THE DEVILS NIGHT
by
DAVID JACOBS

A new novel of terror inspired by the Universal Monsters

Berkley Boulevard Books
Based on the Classic Universal Monsters

THE DEVIL'S NIGHT

THE DEVIL'S BROOD

RETURN OF THE WOLF MAN

THE DEVIL'S NIGHT

The New Adventures of Dracula,
Frankenstein & the Universal Monsters

david jacobs

Based on the Classic Universal Monsters

BERKLEY BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed"
to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received
any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE DEVIL'S NIGHT

A Berkley Boulevard Book / published by arrangement with

Universal Studios Publishing Rights, a division of Universal Studios
Licensing, Inc.

Publishing HISTORY

Berkley Boulevard edition / February 2001

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2001 by Universal Studios Publishing Rights,

a division of Universal Studios Licensing, Inc.

The Universal Studios Monsters are a trademark and copyright

of Universal Studios. All rights reserved.

Book design by Carolyn Letter.

Cover design by Erika Fusari.

Cover illustration by Jeff Albrecht

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form
without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguuiputnam.com

ISBN: 0-425*17860-9

BERKLEY BOULEVARD

Berkley Boulevard Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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are trademarks belonging id Penguin Putnam Inc.

Published IN the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321

/ know that flesh can run like water, that skin is just a
wrapper, that rationality and even consciousness itself are
mere shadows floating on a sea of fire. I know that because I am Wilfred Glendon III, grandson of the original
Werewolf of London--and a werewolf myself.

There was a sense of rushing, headlong motion. Glendon lay flat on his
back, strapped down to a gurney, while a pair of orderlies wheeled the
hospital-type cart through a maze of winding halls and corridors.

The handlers were in a hurry, moving at quick time, racing around blind
corners, down empty halls.

One said, "What's the rush? Moonrise is hours away." The other said,
"Maybe, but it's already after dark."

They did not slow down.

The walls were clean, two-toned, dark green from floor to shoulder
height and pale green from there to the ceiling, which was some kind of
ash-gray composite paneling with inset fluorescent tubes running along
the length of it, blurry glow-bars of light.

His vision was off. His perspective was like a fisheye lens, making
shapes weirdly elongated, faces gargoyle like.

Or maybe the orderlies really were gargoyles; in this madhouse, he
couldn't be sure.

It wasn't really a madhouse, though, despite the clinical trappings. Not
a madhouse in the usual sense of the word.

Drugs were involved. That much he knew. He'd been heavily sedated, and
he was still deeply under then power--barely awake. He kept drifting in
and out of consciousness and he tried to fight it, to keep from slipping
back under that warm, suffocating blanket of nullity.

His body was inert, heavy, leaden. He couldn't move, couldn't even lift
his head. But his eyes were open. That was something. Not long ago, he
couldn't even do that.

But they were open now. He fought to keep them that way.

The headlong momentum of his rush through the halls caused cool air to
wash across his open eyeballs.

His vision was blurred, distorted, no doubt an effect of the drugs. They
robbed him of his ability to concentrate, plan. There was a weird,
carefree feeling, of uncontrolled abandonment, a lack of centeredness.

There was a pattern here, pressing itself on his awareness.

The periods when the drugs carried him away into Neverland were growing
shorter, and his periods of--not lucidity, but some kind of
semicoherence, were lengthening.

If they lasted longer, he might even be able to achieve some continuity
of thought.

And then what? Why, he might even be able to remember who he was and
where he was.

He was Glendon, he knew that. Wilfred Glendon I'll.

But that was only part of it. There was something else, something
vitally important, a key datum about himself that was literally a matter
of life and death.

He'd had it before, grasping it momentarily, but then the mind-numbing
inertia of his drugged state reasserted itself, smothering that hard
tough kernel of grim truth in an ocean of will-less apathy.

A pair of metal doors loomed ahead, steel-plated wedges with portholes
set at head height, a seemingly solid barrier to this violent forward
motion.

His green-clad handlers did not slacken their pace.

Over the tops of his feet he could see the doors nearing.

The forward edge of the cart served as a battering ram, shoving open the
double doors, which swung back closed after they'd passed.

They loaded him into an elevator, one whose car was wide enough to
accommodate the cart and its handlers.

In the center of the ceiling was an inset lamp with a frosted lens
panel. He watched it during the ride.

He couldn't see the floor indicator panel, but somehow he knew that the
car was rising, ascending from somewhere deep belowground.

That much he remembered, that he'd been imprisoned in an underground
complex, buried far below the surface of the earth.

Twice-buried. Once, beneath the pile of steel and masonry that was this
building; and again, under the wash of drugs used to sedate and control
him.

The elevator car bumped to a halt, the door slid open, and he was
wheeled into another series of corridors, these curved, narrow, and
winding.

Through more doors, and then he was wheeled into a lab room.

Glendon's vision sharpened for an instant, and he got a good look at the
two gorillas in pale green hospital scrubs who'd brought him to this
place.

They weren't really gorillas, of course, that was just a figure of
speech. They were just two big men, very big men, but no more than that.
Or were they?

Their faces were low-browed and thuggish, with deep set small round dim
eyes and cruel mouths and massive amounts of chin and jaw. There was
something bestial about them, and that was even before he took in their
heavily muscled shoulders, thick torsos and oversized, pawlike hands
that were reaching for him.

Then the focus slipped away and he went somewhere else, mentally, as the
mind fog once again tried to swallow him up. Through a haze he saw the
handlers were leaning over him, their thick fingers fumbling with the
catches of canvas restraining straps that banded his chest and legs.

Why, his wrists, were similarly bound, in reinforced cuffs that secured
his hands to the metal side rails of the cart! He hadn't even noticed.

Buckles were undone, straps fell away from his limbs, then hands were at
him, expertly lifting him from horizontal to vertical, sitting him up on
the cart and holding him in place.

Being upright, that was a whole different world. Bemused, he looked
around.

He was in a room with a square-shaped floor and smooth-plastered
off-white walls and a peaked ceiling that slanted at an oblique angle.
The space was crowded with people and machinery.

Beside the two handlers, there were about a half-dozen other people
milling around the room.

People?

He wondered why he'd wondered that. Of course they were people. What
else could they be? They were people, normal, everyday people, just like
him.

Only ... what was he? Glendon, yes, but what else?

Who else?

This was a place of testing.

There were computer consoles and columns of stacked hardware: instrument
panels, screens, gauges, dials, and pumps. There were lights, lots of
them, some built into the ceiling and walls, others clustered in banks
on portable metal trees. Despite their profusion, the effect was not
overly bright. Most of the lights had been dimmed, with many pin lights
and baby spotlights in use. Whoever had set the lighting level liked to
keep the lamps low, the atmosphere intimate. Gloomy dimness and shadows
pooled in the corners and edges of the room.

That was a blessing. His eyes were light sensitive and even a little
brightness would be too much for him now.

Nearby stood a chair, an elaborate floor-mounted one whose shape was
suggestive of a dentist's chair. Or an electric chair.

The chair faced a wall that was pierced by three tall windows. Their
sills were waist-high, the frames rising to pointed arches whose tips
nearly touched the ceiling.

The handlers slid him off the cart and hefted him into the chair,
setting him down lightly, his feet never touching the floor.

They hovered over him, lifting his limbs, positioning him in this
high-backed, cushioned, reinforced-metal framed chair with an oversized
headrest the curved wings of which wrapped around the sides of his head
like blinders.

The handlers were doing their workmanlike thing, fastening him into the
chair. That was decent of them, he decided. The straps they were locking
around his wrists and chest would keep him from falling out of the
chair.

"Thanks. Damned decent of you fellows," he said out loud, or tried to.

He didn't know if he'd actually said anything or merely thought he had.

But he must have said something, because the handlers had stiffened,
then recoiled, stepping back from him.

After a pause, they thrust their faces forward, studying him. Gargoyle
faces, like carved totems or Easter Island statues.

They looked scared. But how could that be? Surely they weren't scared of
him? They studied him, frowning, faces screwed up in what was almost a
parody of furious concentration.

Someone said sharply, "What's wrong, Rukan?"

Apparently Rukan was one of the handlers, the one on Glendon's left. He
said, "He's coming around, Mr. Frome." He sounded worried.

Rukan stepped aside, removing his bulk from Glendon's field of vision
and partially unblocking his view.

Across from him stood the man the handler had spoken to--Frome. He had
short dark hair, dark-ringed eyes, and a square-shaped, blue-jowled
face. He wore a charcoal gray suit and a slate-blue shirt and tie.

He leaned forward, peering at Glendon, not getting too close. "Hmm. He
shouldn't be coming out of it yet."

Beside him stood a portly, florid-faced man, with a headful of wavy
golden-bronze hair and a pear-shaped face. He wore an expensive navy
suit made of some shiny material and a colorful tie that looked like an
operating room accident.

Turning to him, Frome said, "What about it, Dr. Lambert?"

Lambert checked his watch, a bulky and expensive looking timepiece. He
frowned, knitting bushy, tufted eyebrows.

He said, "It's a little early yet for the sedation to be wearing off,
but it's still within acceptable operating parameters.

After all, we don't want him so stupefied that he can't react to the
test stimuli."

Frome spoke to the handlers. "Rukan, Glebe. Get him hi those restraints,
they'll hold him."

Glebe, it appeared, was the other handler, Rukan's partner.

Exchanging glances, they loomed over Glendon, returning to their task.

Glebe was thick-fingered, clumsy now with the straps and fastenings.
Sweat slicked his narrow forehead. His breathing was quick, shallow.
Glendon could smell the fear coming off him.

Rukan seemed to be tougher, more hard-boiled, but both men showed
genuine relief when their task was done, and they moved away from him
quickly.

Glendon felt like his bones were jelly, like he'd been poured into the
seat. But the restraints held him upright.

He wore a pah- of loose-fitting green pajama-type pants, his feet bare.
From the waist up he was naked, except for the straps banding his chest,
securing him to the padded chair. His forearms rested on cushioned
armrests, with thick cuffs circling his wrists, binding them.

His hands and feet felt like distant outposts in inter mittent
communication with the rest of him. He felt neither warm nor cold.

The chair stood opposite the middle of the three windows.

The space between them was empty, providing a clear avenue between
window and chair. The middle window, like the pair flanking it, was
covered with a blank battleship-gray shutter, whether of plastic or
metal he could not tell. The shutters were opaque. Behind them could
have been light or night.

Somehow, he knew it was night. Just knew it, with a gut certainty. How
did he know? he wondered. He didn't know how he knew. Logic, hunch,
animal instinct? The hair on the back of his neck tingled, and he
shivered; he'd heard oldsters describe the feeling as "someone walking
on my grave."

From the way the others reacted, they'd felt that way, too. The handlers
had flinched and Frome stiffened. Dr. Lambert dealt with it best, but
his eyes widened, then narrowed, and his mouth went tight. Repressing a
shudder, he forced his face back into its former expression of bland
equability, strain showing only at the edges.

Now Glendon knew what it was that they all reminded him of--small
rodents suddenly surprised by a large reptile.

The handlers ducked their heads in what Glendon realized was a bow, then
sidled away. Frome and Lambert moved to one side, turning toward a new
arrival who'd just entered the room. Their body language revealed
extreme deference to the newcomer. Equipment blocked Glendon's view of
the stranger. Stranger? They were all strangers to him here.

The newcomer spoke, a female voice. "It's the night.

That's what makes him restless." Frame said, "Yes, Countess."

Lambert said, "Can he really sense such things, before the change?"

The woman said, "The beast is with him always, doctor.

The beast is him, they are one and the same."

"Hmm. Interesting."

She came around the columnar consoles, gliding into Glendon's view. Of
medium height, she was girl-slim, but with rounded curves. A helmet of
short glossy black hair cut in bangs across the forehead framed her
fine-featured face, with its wide dark gleaming eyes and red-ripe,
sensual mouth. Her skin was rice white. Not pink but white, giving her
face a masklike look. She wore a cowl-necked long-sleeved short dark
knit dress, a wide red leather belt, and knee-length red leather
high-heeled boots.

She fixed her gaze on Glendon, said, "Hello, lover.

Remember me?" Lambert said unctuously, "Who could forget you, Countess
Marya Zaleska? Not even the dead."

"Them least of all," she said. "Why do you not flatter me shamelessly as
the doctor does, Frame?"

"I'm afraid gallantry is not my forte, Countess," Frame said, giving
Lambert a dirty look.

Marya Zaleska.

He did remember! Not much, but enough. Standing before him now, she was
lovely, ballerinalike, elusive, with fresh-faced loveliness. Girlish,
merry.

There was something horrible about her but he couldn't quite bring it to
mind. Still, in all this place, he knew that she was the worst horror
yet.

Strange ... how did he know this was a place of horrors?

Dr. Lambert beckoned an unseen assistant. "Prepare him for the IV drug
feed, Nurse Haraisch." "Yes, doctor," she said, coining forward. Nurse
Harnisch was horse-faced, thick-limbed, with short curly gray hair and
black button earrings. She wore a white doctor's tunic and pants, rubber
gloves, and white rubber-soled shoes.

Rukan and Glebe pushed an equipment cart alongside Glendon. On the cart
top was a suitcase-sized metal box, fronted with a row of glass
rubber-stoppered flasks, each filled with a different-colored fluid.
Plastic pipettes ran from the stoppers of each tube, converging in a
single trunk line, a half inch in diameter--the feed line.

At the other end of the line was a needle. Nurse Harnisch swabbed the
inside of his right elbow with alcohol.

There was a stinging sensation as she thrust the needle into a vein,
securing it with some strips of white adhesive medical tape. A control
panel on the box adjusted the flow of drugs and chemicals in the flasks,
their combinations and dosages.

Dr. L^ambert said, "Let's put him under a little deeper while the
electrodes are being attached."

Nurse Hamisch administered a sedative cocktail to the subject. She
turned a dial on the drug-box control panel and after a few heartbeats
Glendon could feel a leaden dullness creeping through his veins, like
ice water, dripping through the pipette needle taped to his inner arm.

Blankness spread through him, freezing his brain. He could feel his mind
seizing up, like a hot engine suddenly deprived of lubricating oil.

He Went away.

When he returned, he sat at the center of an electronic w6k Flat,
corn-shaped metal wafers were taped to his upperbody, his torso, arms,
neck, and skull. Each of these electrode sensors trailed a thin wire,
the wires radiating out from him into the jacks and terminals of various
monitoring machines huddled around him, their screens and readout graph
paper tracking his vital signs. Rukan and Glebe were more than just
muscle. They fixed the electrodes on Glendon. Their medical knowledge
extended that far, at least.

Taping down one of the last metal disks on Glendon's flesh, Rukan said,
"Hairy brute."

It was true. Glendon was covered with body hair from head to toe, wiry
reddish-brown hair over his back, shoulders, chest, and belly. Tufts
grew out of his ears, and the backs of his hands showed hair clear down
to his fingertips.

Where they showed out of the bottoms of his pants, his ankles and feet
were hairy, too.

Glendon was tall and rawboned, long-limbed, with wavy dark hair that
came down in a widow's peak whose tip reached for the space between his
eyebrows, where hairs grew, so that it seemed he had one long eyebrow.

His shoulders were broad, his torso tapered. Purple-brown bruises marked
the places on his inner arms where he'd been shot up with various drugs.

Not looking up from what he was doing, Glebe said, "If you think he's
hairy now, wait until later."

"You wait. When I'm through here, I'm leaving!" Nurse Harnisch asked
pointedly, "You finished there?" "Almost," Rukan said with false
brightness. He and Glebe completed the last attachments, then hurried
off to the sidelines.

Glendon's head hung down, chin on chest. He moaned, shuddering. But he
was coming together. His thoughts were scattered, smeared all over the
darkness behind the backs of his eyes, but they were gathering, impelled
by some irresistible gravity like force to fall back to the core of his
being.

There was a center here, something he could focus on.

With a groan, he lifted his head, so that it fell backward against the
headrest.

"Ah," Marya Zaleska breathed. "Back among the living." Dr. Lambert said,
"Yes, he's coming around."

Nurse Harnisch said, "Doctor, should I give him more sedative?"

Lambert looked to Marya, who said, "Not just yet."

The nurse moved her hand away from the drug-console dial.

A handful of lesser medical and electronics technicians bustled around
the scene. The room was wired, an electro hutch. Instrument banks
glowed, pulsed, hummed. Somewhere deep in the formless masses of fog and
clouds that was Glendon's awareness was a hot, pulsing red core, like an
undersea volcano of the mind.

A tech announced, "We're fully wired and ready to begin."

Frame expounded on the setup to his patron, Marya Zaleska. He said,
"Those ceiling and wall-mounted vid/audio units will pick up everything.
This is a rare scientific opportunity. This data is priceless!"

Lambert chimed in, looking up from a life-systems monitor screen.
"Glendon's heartbeat is strong, slow and steady. Respiration and
circulatory rates are slowed from the residual effects of the drugs."

"Hello! What's this? A definite rise in the heart rate." "Moonrise,"
Marya said. "Like the nightfall. He can feel it."

Her eyes glowed with tiny flecks of red. She could feel the moonrise,
too, even through the shuttered windows.

Through solid walls, too.

Lambert said, "Look at this! The speedup of his heart rate corresponds
in degree to the increasing angle of the full moon rising above the
horizon."

Inside, the gloomy testing room was streaked and webbed by the shifting
sine curves flowing on screens--blue-white printouts; myriad red ember
eyes of switches; ruby and emerald operating lights; scrolling waves of
data that cast flickering reflections, like light shining off water.

Marya was not entirely comfortable in this techno hutch cocoon; she was
still essentially a gothic preindus trial type. But she could take
comfort-power from the outer night, the full moon, and the awesome pulse
of occult energy lodged in the body of Glendon, chained to the chair.

She said, "Bring in the bait."

Dr. Lambert looked puzzled. "The bait?"

"The other experimental subject."

He still looked blank.

"The girl," she said.

Frome told the handlers, "Bring in the girl!"

Rukan and Frome exited the room, returning with a captive teenage girl.
Denise was in her late teens, with a Dutch-boy haircut, wide round face
with traces of baby fat, and a buxom, full-fleshed body, wrapped in a
sand colored one-piece jumpsuit that buttoned up the front; on her feet
were hospital slippers.

Denise was gagged; otherwise her hysterical pleadings would have proved
highly distracting to the workplace environment. Above the gag, her wide
blue staring eyes were surrounded by white eyeballs and her normally
florid coloring was very pale. Circling her waist was a twelve inch-high
leather waistband with various steel rings, to which her cuffed wrists
had been closely chained.

Rukan and Glebe braced her, each holding her under the arms, holding up
the weight her fear-watered knees and rubbery legs could no longer
support.

The handlers talked low-voiced, out of the sides of their mouths. Rukan
said approvingly, "A big, strapping peasant-type girl." Glebe said,
"Nice and juicy."

"Well, he should appreciate that." By "he," Rukan meant Glendon, whom he
indicated with a nod.

"He's not the only one." Glebe smacked his lips.

They whisked Denise to a clear space in the hardware filled chamber,
between the shuttered windows and Glendon in the chair.

It was all in the name of science--albeit occult science --but surely it
was no coincidence that Denise was of the physical type from which Marya
Zaleska had first fed so very long ago, and which she still preferred as
her vessel.

Nice and juicy.

Except when feeding, Marya always looked too thin.

Now, eyeing Denise, she looked absolutely famished, hollow-cheeked with
hunger, half-starved. The whites of her eyes had turned red.

In the floor was bolted a metal square, complete with a steel ring. A
length of chain was attached to the ring and its other end fastened to
the captive's restraint belt.

The length of the chain allowed her to sit on the floor, or kneel, but
not to stand up.

Rukan and Glebe finished their work and moved aside.

Denise's stark fear and her smooth pink skin, filled to bursting with
all that rich young red blood, acted like a whip against Marya's senses,
intoxicating and disturbing.

Lambert stood over the girl, trying to look avuncular. He cooed,
"Careful, dear, don't fight so hard against the restraints.

You'll do yourself harm."

Frome said, "That's our business."

Lambert tsk-tsked. "She's really quite agitated. In a state of hysteria,
near shock. Perhaps she needs sedation."

"Let her be. It's better that her senses be undulled so that she can
broadcast her fear at full volume." "Ever the technician, eh, Frome?"
Lambert smiled benevolently at Denise, showing crocodile teeth. "Don't
worry, dear, no one's going to harm you." Frome said in an aside,
"That's not exactly true."

"Er, well, none of us is going to harm you," Lambert amended, glancing
significantly at Glendon.

He and Frome moved off.

Trembling, Denise sat on the floor with her legs folded to one side.
Once she'd been locked in place, she was ignored, lab personnel stepping
around her as they went about their duties in the chamber.

Raiding sounded as she squirmed and jerked against the chain. Lambert,
irked, called, "See here, you young fool, you'll break your neck!"

Marya went to Denise, standing over her. The girl shrank, drawing into
herself, head down, looking away.

Marya's pointed, elegant boot toes edged nearer.

The girl's moist eyes rolled madly, head back, nostrils distended,
hyperventilating, spittle bubbling through the airholes in her gag.

Marya spoke her name, a whisper, more felt than heard.

A velvet stroke.

"Denise."

The girl looked away.

Marya spoke her name, again. Some of those working nearby looked up,
suddenly. They'd felt some of the residual effects of Marya's compelling
power. Even though the message wasn't for them, they still picked up
enough of it to feel its passage. One of them shuddered.

Lambert had heard the whisper, too. He watched, fascinated, avidly
staring at Marya's ripe, subtly smiling mouth. He was looking for fangs
but didn't see any; they were too well hidden by her lips.

"Denise!"

The call fell on the girl's brain with a soft, stunning effect, a
velvet-wrapped iron bar. Denise stiffened. Marya made a slight gesture,
seemingly without meaning. It was a hypnotic hand pass.

Denise's eyes closed, lids stretched tautly across bulging orbs, body
rigid, her full-breasted chest rising and falling with deep, heavy
breathing. But at least she had stopped struggling.

Looking up, Marya saw Lambert watching her. In her eyes were twin red
points, and in the instant that she met his gaze, he felt their impact,
an electric spark, a shock, racing across his suddenly tautened nerves,
causing his heart to skip a beat. He couldn't breathe, until she broke
the eye contact. Then he colored, looking away. There were better
reasons than mere subservience for not meeting the gaze of one's patron,
especially when that patron was Marya Zaleska.

The moon was high. This was confirmed by a board operator monitoring a
screen with outside video-camera coverage. Marya knew it without being
told, but she kept it to herself. Long experience had taught her to keep
her powers and abilities secret, whenever possible.

All was in place: Glendon, Denise, a full moon. The experiment was ready
to begin.

Marya said, "Dim the lights."

The lights were already low, but the dimmers took them down farther,
thickening the air with deep brown gloom that pressed down on the hooded
diodes and glowing screens of the instrument boards. The research team
was uncomfortable with the dimness, feeling it hampered their
efficiency. The security guards, clustered at the edges of the chamber
and in the outer hall, disliked it because it hindered their ability to
react. That's what they told themselves consciously. But the shadows
increased Marya's powers, and subconsciously they knew it and feared it.
She was unnerving enough in full light

Now she chose her spot, occupying a place where the shadows were deep.
Red pinpoints glowed in her eyes.

The humans in the room fought their feelings of unease, concentrating
harder on their work.

Marya said, "Open the shutters."

Someone threw the switch. With a hum of electric motors and hydraulic
winches, the shutters retracted into side slots in the casements. They
slid out of sight, opening on the night.

Beyond the clear plastic panes lay cold, darkness, night, empty air. The
testing place was now revealed to be a room high in an upper floor of
the stark, vaulting, futuristic structure known as the Wissenschaftlich
Palast, the Science Palace, in Visaria, the capital city of an
independent microstate located north of the Alps.

Between the mountains and the city stood Lake Lorelei, to the north of
which was a flat-topped knoll where the Science Palace rose, fronting
the south side of the town plaza.

The testing place's windows opened on the east, looking out on a
sprawling section of office and commercial buildings. Beyond that lay
residential areas and districts, cut by the serpentine River Undine,
spanned by bridges and aqueducts. On the east bank of the river was Old
Town, with many picturesque, aged buildings with gabled roofs, narrow
streets, and few lights. Lots of old stone churches and abandoned and/or
ill-kept graveyards there, too.

It was a cold, clear night. Above the glow of the city lights rose a
black sky full of frosty, winking stars. In the east, the moon was still
hidden from view, moonglow shining above the skyline.

Now what the experimenters had been waiting for occurred.

The moon rose, edging the roofs and climbing up the arc of night sky.
Full moon. Moonlight gleamed on rooftops, squares, and the river winding
its way through town.

Glendon was restive, fidgeting, squirming, like a sleeper suffering bad
dreams. As the moon rose, he turned his face toward it.

The board operators reported, "There's increased electrical activity in
the brain."

"All his brain waves are spiking."

"Heartbeat and respiration are accelerating."

As the moon's orb showed above the windowsills, touching him with its
beams, Glendon shuddered. An allover body shudder, from head to toe.

He stiffened, his flesh sliding, rippling, bulging. His limbs pulsated,
expanding and contracting. Muscles flexed, veins and tendons crawling
and wriggling over them.

Chained nearby to the floor, Denise looked away, try ing not to watch
Glendon shuddering with abnormal convulsions.

The moon crept upward, a hard bright chunk of bone yellow pebble,
pouring its rays through the windows.

Marya couldn't help but feel its pull. Her slitted eyes glittered.

Moonbeams shone through the clear pane, pouring into the room and over
Glendon, restrained in the chair.

Eyes squeezed shut, he writhed in the moonbath, groaning louder and more
frequently as the moon rose higher in the windows. His hair stood on
end, the hair on his head and on his body, each separate strand
vibrating stiffly and wirelike, as if energized by some electricity in
the moonlight.

When the full moon shone its light squarely onto his face, his eyes
opened. They were bloodred.

Brighter than the radiant moonlight was a lake of hellfire, red as
boiling blood, bubbling away in the pit of his brain. Bloodlight came
lancing up the shaft, shooting into his mind.

Now he knew. Hell was within him.

He began to change.

He felt himself moving a great distance through a void, even though he
was sitting still. Floor and ceiling tilted, the room spun. There was a
roaring in his ears. He realized it was the hoarse rasping of his
breath.

"Look at those vital signs--astonishing!"

"His metabolism has heated up like a furnace--"

"Furnace? More like a nuclear reactor!"

Banks of dullness and foggy incapability boiled off him. Internal fires
were consuming the mind-numbing drugs in his bloodstream, burning off
the impurities. Traceries of liquid fire fanned out through his brain,
lighting it up with infernal brilliance. There was a sense of falling,
plunging, slipping into the crack between worlds. Images assaulted him,
a million faces and scenes all in a grain of sand, a drop of blood. Now
he remembered!

He was Wilfred Glendon III, grandson of the original Glendon, Glendon I.
His grandfather had been an acclaimed explorer, respected researcher,
loving husband-- and the Werewolf of London.

"The werewolf is a satanic creature, neither man nor beast but with the
worst instincts of both." So had said the long-dead Dr. Yogami, savant,
occultist, and a werewolf himself, who'd bitten the senior Glendon while
he was on an expedition to Tibet, his venomous bite transforming the
scientist into an inhuman fiend prowling London, hell-bent on murder and
mayhem. Consumed with an irresistible impulse to kill! Yogami was dead
from Glendon I's bite, and Glendon I was long-dead, too, if not gone,
since he lived on in ghostly fashion, appearing to warn the grandson
he'd never known that the taint of lycanthropy had been spliced into his
genes, transmitted through the male descendants of the Glendon line.

Glendon EG, himself an ethnobotanist and researcher, had felt the curse
coming on him, invading first his dreams and then his very flesh.

But that was only the beginning, for destiny had thrown him into a
bizarre shadow world of vampires, ghosts, werewolves, witches, and
monsters, a world that exists parallel to our own, to what he now
laughingly realized he'd thought was reality.

As a werewolf, he was a fountainhead of black sorcery and satanic evil,
a magnet for the devotees of such, who sought to bend and enslave him to
their own purposes.

Such a woman was Marya Zaleska, the mistress of this place.

She was the high priestess of a devil cult with worldwide branches,
headquartered right here in Visaria, below the northern Alps, an
independent sovereign ministate; the Monaco of Monsters.

Here was the center of the cult, and here in this building, the Science
Palace, was their citadel. Built on the site of an ancient castle, its
real heart lay in the labs, surgeries, vaults, and crypts of its
extensive underground sublevels. There were galleries and catacombs and
tunnels, shafts and passageways stretching down and down into the earth.
Closer to the surface were chambers where corpses sat hand in skeletal
hand around the table, where ghosts were invoked. Laboratories where
super-science mixed with sorcery to create and empower new gods and
monsters.

That wasn't the worse of it.

Glendon was focused now, himself again, but too late.

For the entity that was Glendon wasn't a destination, but merely a way
station on the road to damnation, to howling unholy bloodlust.

His powers grew. His senses expanded, sharpening. He could feel the heat
of warm-blooded bodies around him; smell the sweat and fear that exuded
from them. There was the intoxicating scent of ozone from the machines,
sharp chemical smells, throbbing electric motors.

It was hard to hold his focus with the moonlight flooding into him,
bathing every cell of his flesh with its occult power. The orb drew upon
his bloodtides, making them rush and sing through his veins, making the
neuro chemicals spin in his whirling brain.

The scene wavered, blurring, as he blinked away tears, and then he could
see clearly. The moon was bright as daylight, banishing all shadows. The
alien construct of the techno-web cocooned him, binding him in cords and
nodes of science-borne nullity that enslaved him to another's plan.

That other was no scientist.

Marya Zaleska. Her face shone. Her fire eyes flashed and she laughed,
red lips drawing back to show sharp pointed fangs gleaming in her
voracious mouth. He knew her for what she was: a thirsty corpse.

A vampire.

The others in the room were human, more or less. Evildoers, devil
worshipers, scientist-sorcerers, but still human. They weren't charged
with power as she was, a black battery of diabolic force.

Of all those in the room, she was the only really dangerous one. He'd
already fallen behind her in the game, becoming her prisoner, chained,
drugged, ensorcelled, mind-controlled, channeled, possessed, stripped of
secrets, and now once more being used.

Well might she use Glendon, who was soft and weak.

But not the werewolf! He was a wolverine of ravening destruction, and
that was when he was in a good mood, with nothing standing between him
and a whole wide waiting world of screaming victims.

But when he was crossed, laughed at, or otherwise thwarted ... Now he
had the sense of himself as a body, rooted in reality. It was a good
strong body, built werewolf-tough.

Savage, fierce, feral.

A nova burst of red rage exploded through him, radiating energy into
every pore. He ached for blood, murder, fire, rapine. Evil be his meat
and drink!

His brain seethed with plans, schemes, ploys. Now that he was himself
again, he had full confidence in his ability to outwit and destroy his
enemies, to use their bare limbs for scratching posts just to sharpen
his talons, shredding the flesh in ribbons; his fangs would tear into
the still-beating hearts and drink their lifeblood and eat their souls
to make them his slaves to serve him in hell--

And then he realized he really wasn't himself after all.

He was something else, something better. A beast.

But this was no ordinary beast, with a normal animal's healthy appetites
and naturalness. This was a raging blood luster with an insatiable need
for killing.

Werewolf.

"He's ... changing!"

Under that lunar tidal pull, ductless glands became hyperactive,
miniature biochemical factories flooding his system with secretions,
catalytic agents that superspeeded up bodily processes of cellular
growth, replacement, and specialization.

"Here he goes!"

Glendon's form shifted, rippling, face spasming. His eyeballs bulged,
his eyes red. The hair on his scalp rippled, like tall weeds rustled by
the wind. His face rippled, too. His flesh. Below the skin, there was
movement, change.

His shape shifted.

His face lengthened, the bones of the skull showing under sliding flesh,
jawbones growing, lips cracking, gums splitting as shiny white fang tips
thrust their way up, growing out of his jaw.

Eye hollows deepened, red eyes receding, glowing em berlike in dark
sunken pits. Tips sprouted at the tops of his ears, the ears growing,
becoming jagged triangles of flesh.

Marya slipped her hypnotic control of Denise's mind, freeing the girl
from her trance. At the same time she tore off the captive's gag.

Glendon growled, a deep, low, guttural, infinitely menacing growl.
Denise came to herself with a start, gasping.

Marya laughed, silvery musical chimes.

Glendon glared, fangs bared. Denise got a good look at him and then she
really started screaming.

Glendon kept on morphing. A coarse reddish-brown pelt of bristly
boarlike hair thatched his shoulders, back, chest, and belly.

Fingernails became like spear points, thrusting from his fingers,
becoming talons, the fingers curling, clawing at the padded armrests.

All the needles rock-slammed into the red on the gauges; the charted
waves and graphs spiked and skittered, crackling with impossible highs
and lows.

"All vitals red-lining! We have lycanthrope!"

Transformation was agony, but even pain was pleasure in the full thrust
of becoming, of transcending. Becoming the werewolf was not a descent
into a lower state, but into a higher one, freeing the feral creature
within to achieve its full potential. To be merely human was to be dead,
compared with this sublime experience.

Seized by wonderment, Dr. Lambert gasped. "An unholy miracle ..."

Denise's raw screams rubbed feral Glendon's nerves raw; their ringing
hysteria whipping him into an urge to lash out, to strike, to kill!

He'd make her scream--

Denise fainted.

Marya said, "The screams were exciting him!" She was excited herself.

Lambert said, "Torturing him, I'd say!"

"Torture, yes, yes. He'd love to be at her, ripping her soft pink flesh
with his new-grown fangs and claws. But he can't. He's imprisoned in the
chair, and so must suffer agonies of temptation, with fresh hot prey
staked out right under his nose, but beyond his reach."

"How long can he maintain himself at this pace? His vital signs are
whipped up off the chart. No man can take much more of this and live."

"No man, doctor! But this is no man, this is werewolf!"

"Remarkable! Utterly fantastic!"

Some of the techs and orderlies watched Glendon, bug eyed and
slack-jawed, amazed. Terrified.

Frame cracked the whip. "Get back to what you're doing. Stop gaping and
look to your work! You're scientists, not gawkers at a carnival
sideshow!"

Marya's boot toe prodded Denise in the side, ungently.

The girl started coming out of her faint, moaning dully, eyelids
fluttering, mouth a round groaning O.

The werewolf tore at his restraints, eyes blazing, mouth foaming, white
froth spewing from between gnashing fangs.

Marya said, "Look at him suffer. He needs to get at her, to rend and
kill, but he can't. Pure torture. Taken long enough, it would drive a
man insane. But this is no man, it's a werewolf."

She was vehement "Let him suffer until his hyper stimulated metabolism
starts to consume itself in frus trated kill-lust! Once he's learned who
his master is-- me--then he can have the girl.

"Only then, and not before. He must know who it is that allows him to
feed.

"What's more, once he's returned to human form, the guilt will be a
potent tool with which I can bind him to me. My healing arts can salve
his conscience."

Lambert was taken aback by Glendon's relentless ferocity.

"Look at him glaring at us! He knows we're talking about him. If looks
could kill ...!

"This is no dumb brute. He's a hormone-driven homicidal maniac."

Marya said, "It's more than that, Lambert. There's something about a
werewolf that science can never explain."

Glendon heard, and fought to keep from laughing. Did they really believe
they could actually outthink him?

Fools! His brain was a thousand times keener than those of his would-be
masters. His thoughts glowed with hellfire, lighting up his brain. He
could have screamed with laughter. They were all so damned smart, but
they'd forgotten one thing, one all-important concept.

They'd tried to bind a shapeshifter, one whose flesh and very bones were
mutable, changeable, plastic. If he could change his shape, how could
the chains hold him?

His hands had already changed, becoming hairy, paw like, with elongated
fingers and claws.

Now he pulled at them, trying to free his hands from the cuffs. There
was no give in the padded, reinforced restraints, but there was in his
hands. As he pulled, he concentrated on the area, feeling his forearms
change their shape. The flexible bones shifted, flowing. His wrists
grew, stretching, lengthening.

Lambert pointed. "Look! He's changing again! He can't break the cuffs,
so he's shifting shape!

"But how'd he think of that--"

Marya said, "Because he's thinking."

"We'd better put him back under, don't you agree?"

Not waiting for an answer, Lambert turned to Nurse Harnisch, standing
hunched over the drug-box console, watching Glendon's antics with gaping
stupefaction.

"Increase the dosage until the subject is rendered unconscious, nurse."

"Yes, Dr. Lambert."

Glendon held his fingers together, cupping them, turning them hi on each
other, as he pulled them through the cuffs, flesh morphing like kneaded
clay, deforming.

Squash it here and it comes bulging out there.

Coarse-grained pores on the backs of his hands and wrists secreted a
thick, oily sweat, filling the air with a raw, pungent musky scent. The
secretions greased up his flesh, making it slippery.

Lambert snapped, "Where's that sedative, nurse?"

"It's full open, doctor. He's getting the full dose, but it's not
working!"

"Impossible! That should have knocked out an elephant!"

Marya said, "That's no elephant, doctor, it's a werewolf!

His metabolism is turned up so high that the drugs are neutralized as
soon as they enter the bloodstream!"

There was a gloating tone in her voice, as if she were somehow proud of
him, like the owner of a blue-ribbon pet.

First one pawlike hand, then the other popped free from the cuffs that
were now too targe to hold Glendon.

From the elbows down, Glendon's arms looked like some kind of funhouse
minor image, with about twelve additional inches added to his forearms
and hands. His fingers were long and spindly, like spider legs.

The extreme elasticity was short-lived, and even as his arms were freed,
the forearms started snapping back into shape, the wrist bones
shortening and thickening.

Standing nearby was Nurse Hamisch, still crouched over the
auto-drug-dispensing machine with her hand working a dial like she was
tuning in a radio.

She seemed to be in reach. Making an exploratory approach, Glendon
slashed at her one-handed, the sound of his arm's passage making an
audible whoosh. Then came a tearing sound.

Nurse Hamisch straightened up, turning. Running diagonally across her
front, from shoulder to opposite hip, were four slashes ripped through
her uniform. They were ripped through her flesh, too.

After an instant, the finger-wide slashes reddened, filling with blood
that started streaming from torn flesh. She screamed, and the blood
spurted harder.

Glendon grinned up at her, froth splashing down his chin. He turned his
leering fanged face up into the blood spray, exulting in it as it
spattered his face.

Nurse Harnisch clapped her hands to her chest, a hammy-looking move,
like something out of grand opera, but this was real, in deadly earnest.
She was trying to hold in her life's blood. She staggered back, slipped
and fell, overturning an instrument tower.

Now that Glendon's hands were free, the rest was easy. He inhaled,
breathing deeply, his chest swelling, breaking the rubberized
body-monitoring band wrapped across it.

Like plucking a stinging insect from his pelt, he pulled out the
needle-tipped drug feed-line pipette taped to the vein in his arm. When
the needle popped out, the skin sealed shut behind it, like a
self-sealing tire closing a puncture.

Reaching down to the sides of the chair, he grabbed the ankle cuffs
where they were fastened to the tubular frame of the chair and ripped
them loose, as easy as tearing the do-not-tear tags off a piece of
furniture.

Now his legs were free, too. Which meant that he was no longer under any
kind of restraint, except for the electrode disks and wires stretching
from various parts of his anatomy to monitoring machines. When he moved,
they began parting like strings.

The werewolf was loose. He stood crouching, blood eyed, clenching and
unclenching his taloned fists. At the edges of the room, there was
surreptitious movement as guards and handlers eased into position to
make a move on him. Closer, though, the techs and machine tenders and
board operators froze motionless, terrified to make even the slightest
betraying move that would draw the man-beast's attention to them.

Denise's screaming stopped off in midshriek as she was struck dumb by
fear. The werewolf was so close to her that he could have reached out
and slashed open her taut throat with one swipe of his claws. But of
course, that was what Marya and her troupe expected him to do, to be a
beast and go for the sure kill, giving them precious time to take back
the initiative and recapture him.

Since they expected him to do the predictable thing, he'd embrace the
unpredictable.

He hopped up onto the seat of the chair, getting his feet under him,
legs doubled. Then he frog-jumped straight up, steel-spring leg muscles
uncoiling, arms raised over his head, reaching, straining. '

His leap enabled him to catch hold of the swivel mounted video-camera
hookup hanging down by a vertical pole from the ceiling.

The security guards and handlers who'd rushed him when he started to
move found that he wasn't there, he was high above them, clinging to the
camera fixture on the ceiling.

For an instant it looked as if the fixture would tear loose from its
moorings under his weight. The metal arm bent and twisted; cables popped
loose; powdered mortar rained down; but the attachment held.

The guards were steroided-out bodybuilders, big chunks of muscle armed
with clubs and cattle prods, which they thrust and slashed at the
werewolf, who hung just out of their reach.

Standing outside the knot of bodies, Rukan pointed a tranquilizer dart
gun at Glendon and pulled the trigger.

With a compressed-air phhht! the weapon spat a dart at the werewolf. To
Glendon's hyperkeen senses, the dart seemed to be moving in lazy slow
motion, and he was easily able to dodge it.

Whizzing past him like a fat humming bumblebee, the dart hit the
opposite wall, smashing against it, smearing it with dark blotches of a
pungent, medicinal-smelling liquid, the tranquilizing drug. The volatile
chemical instantly began vaporizing, filling the air with streamers of a
bizarre, etherlike substance.

The strain of dodging the missile was the last straw for the sorely
tried fixture, which tore loose from the ceiling, sending Glendon
crashing down on the half-dozen or so guards massed below him.

A melee erupted. Glendon quickly learned that the guards were all
outfitted in a kind of body armor of Kevlar-like vests with metallic
high collars that protected them against his slashing talons.

That didn't stop him from taking hold of the head of one nearest to him
and going to work on it with both taloned hands, macerating the unlucky
one's face and then nearly twisting the head off before he let go.

That quelled much of the others' enthusiasm for tackling him head-on.

Frome said, "Back off! Give me a clear shot with the shock gun!"

The musclemen moved aside, opening up a clear lane between Glendon and
Frome. Frome wore insulated anti shock gloves and wielded a Taser-like
device, a piece of potent weaponry armed with contact prongs, wires, and
a powerful battery capable of delivering a nonfatal but incapacitating
electric shock.

Frome leveled the boxy weapon at Glendon, pulling the trigger.

A U-shaped double-pointed metal prong flew from the shock gun's barrel,
spring-propelled, trailing a pair of thin dark streaming wires that
unspooled from inside the weapon, remaining attached to it.

The prongs speared into Glendon's upper right chest, into the bands of
muscle there, staggering nun under the impact. The prongs were the
contact points. Two thin, ul tratough black wires coiled back from the
prongs to the blocky battery-pack generator underslung from the spring
launching mechanism.

In the same split second when the prongs tagged him, Glendon sprang
forward, launching himself headfirst at Frome.

It was a close thing. Frame jerked the trigger, closing the circuit and
sending a massive jolt of electricity through .the wires into Glendon.

It paralyzed Glendon, filling the inside of his head with pure white
crackling force that blanked out the volcanic rage and hung him
suspended in limbo for a timeless time.

He froze, body rigid, unable to move a muscle. But he was already
moving, flying headfirst through the air, clawed hands reaching.

His momentum irresistible, he barreled into Frame, bowling him over,
causing him to drop the shock gun.

With Frame's finger off the trigger, the circuit was broken, shutting
off the power field.

The white vortex broke, catapulting Glendon back into real time.

He lay sprawled on the floor, entangled with Frame.

The prongs were still in his chest, twin wires trailing back to the
weapon, which lay a half-dozen paces away, where it had skittered to a
stop.

Glendon rose, trampling Frome underfoot, generating screams as bones
were crunched.

Quick-reacting, Glebe scrambled for the shock gun, grabbing for it. He
almost had it, fingertips grazing the handgrip, when it was abruptly
yanked out of his reach as Glendon grabbed the wires in one fist and
hauled away on the lines, snapping the whip and sending the weapon
flying across the room.

Glendon jumped up and down on Frome and there was more bone crunching
but no more screaming.

The prongs had gone in deep, lodging in his chest muscles, but he was
not to be denied. He slipped a claw between the prong and his flesh and
popped it out, flicking it free of his flesh, which bore a pair of nasty
puckered holes that closed up tight, stemming the blood flow from the
wounds.

Rukan was angling around for another shot with the dart gun.

Using the wires as the reins, Glendon whipped the heavy clublike weight
of the shock gun through the air, like the bolos he'd seen Argentinian
gauchos use during one of his botanical collecting expeditions.

With supernatural accuracy, he dashed the weapon square into Rukan's
face, pulping it.

Something crackled ominously nearby, the live electrode tip of a
baton-type cattle prod being thrust at him by a guard. Glendon
sidestepped, sucking in his belly so tight that it seemed to scrape flat
against his spine.

The thrusting, stun-charged baton tip missed him by inches as the guard,
off balance, lurched past him.

Glendon helped him along, shoving him in the direction he was going,
sending him skittering helplessly into a man-high instrument-tower
console. It was stacked, reinforced, and braced better than the guard
was. He bounced off it and fell down and didn't get up.

Alarms shrieked, lights flashed, severed cables sparked, and hot blood
hissed, spilling on the floor.

Glendon made for the door, but it was no good. It was blocked by a mass
of fresh guards crowding the corridor outside, about to storm in.

Something struck him from behind, stabbing him in the back. Glancing
over his shoulder, he saw a tranquilizer dart sticking out of his
shoulder blade.

Glebe now held the dart gun, jockeying for a better shot.

Glendon snarled at him, and Glebe lowered the gun, ducking back around
an equipment console to put it between him and the werewolf.

Reaching behind him, Glendon yanked out the dart and threw it to the
floor, shattering it.

Some of the stuff had gotten into him and he wavered under a wave of
dizziness, knees buckling as he started to crumble.

But he shook it off, and even as he did so, he could feel its effect
lessening in his body, which was running too hot to be stopped by any
knockout drugs.

Glendon wheeled and whirled, his brain working. That was another
advantage he had over the foe. They thought he was some kind of half-wit
brute, with at best a kind of animal cunning. Why, compared with his
mighty mind, they were intellectual pygmies, fleas!

But these fleas could bite.

So could Marya, who stood near the three unshuttered windows, avidly
watching the show, transfixed by the slaughter and the streaming
lifeblood being so profusely spilled.

The hunger was on her and she had to fight to keep her own nature in
check because the night was dark, the moon was full, the blood was fresh
and hot, and she was what she was, a vampire!

Her face contorted with the force of the terrible wanting as she eyed
Denise squirming on the floor, still chained in place, bursting with
fear and life force and zesty juices.

She was looking too hard at Denise and not hard enough at Glendon.

He faked a rush toward the windows. A half fake, really, since he was
heading for them after all, with a slight detour. He broke stride,
swerving toward Marya.

Even then, she wasn't afraid, only amazed that even a werewolf would
have the unmitigated gall to attack her.

Then he was on her, giving her a face full of claws.

Werewolf and vampire crashed, clashing, snarling, ripping at each other.

He hooked an arm around her waist, yanking her off her feet and slinging
her over his shoulder. Then he returned to his original objective, the
windows.

He rushed the center window, not slackening when he hit the pane.
Kicking, clawing Marya served as a buffer between him and the solid
obstacle in his path.

The pane was made not of glass but of some kind of clear plastic
compound, virtually bulletproof and shatterproof.

When Glendon and Marya hit it full force, it didn't break, but instead
popped free of its molding, thrusting out into the night. Marya and
Glendon followed, tumbling out the window into empty air, still locked
in a deadly embrace.

They were in a cold breathless void, up among the moon and stars, on a
bulleting trajectory earthward.

The ground was a couple of hundred feet below, but closer than that was
the roof of a wing jutting out from the main body of the building, about
fifty feet below the window. Glendon hadn't known it was there when he
jumped. The keystone of his escape plan was Marya.

The lower wing's slanted roof bristled with satellite dishes, microwave
antennas, needlelike sensor trees, and surveillance periscopes, a
thicket of upright sharp spikes.

Glendon and Marya plunged toward them. She clawed at him but couldn't
break his grip. He'd take her down with him, right onto the spikes.

She changed.

The air around her rippled, like looking through a glass with veined
imperfections in it, riven by the power force needed for this most
awesome of transformations. She shifted and flowed, shifting, bones and
flesh flowing like water, at a speed that made his own tranformation
seem slow.

Glendon nearly lost his grip on her shoulders as they suddenly bulked
up, massing with muscle, expanding, bursting the seams of her garment as
a pair of huge, oversized leathery folded wings suddenly sprouted from
her shoulders and upper back.

Her form shifted, bones stretching, attenuating.

Antenna clusters thrust up like bundles of spears, reaching, nearing.

The vampire's face changed, becoming sharp-featured, triangle-shaped,
batlike, with enormous almond-shaped red eyes with vertical slitted
pupils, jutting cheekbones, and a small ripe mouth filled with sharp
white teeth. Her pointed ears grew, forming into arrowhead-shaped flaps
jutting up.

Cloth tearing, she spread-eagled her arms and legs, tautening the
leathery folds of swelling batwings. The wings were part of her arms,
growing out of the shoulders, attached to the long thinning skeletal
arms and legs with scalloped leathery black bat membranes.

Batwings beat the air frantically, trying to stop or at least slow the
fall.

Among the Undead, only the most powerful vampires can muster the occult
force needed for shapeshifting, to become a giant bat, a wolf, or mist
that can drift through solid walls.

Such a queen vampire was Marya Zaleska.

Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula's daughter.

She did not transform into a bat, but an unnatural hybrid creature, this
nightmarish bat harpy.

Glendon still held on. Marya's furiously beating wings thundered,
buffeting the air.

The spiked roof was nigh.

Marya writhed, squirming, trying to dodge impalement on antenna spikes.
She almost made it.

A metal rod speared her wing, thrusting up through taut leathery
membranes stretching from the underside of massive chest wing bones and
rib cage.

There was a tremendous crash, her collapsing wings absorbing some of the
shock.

Glendon was still with her, having ridden her all the way down. He
smashed into the roof, a terrible impact hammering him, even with his
enhanced fiend powers.

He was stunned, knocked breathless.

Marya hung by her speared wing from the antenna, which had buckled and
bent from the crash. Her feet sprouted clawlike dagger toes that ripped
at Glendon's underbelly.

She shoved him off and away.

The roof was pitched at a forty-five-degree angle and Glendon went
sliding down it headfirst, unable to stop.

When he reached the edge, he clawed at the gutter, grabbing for a
handhold, not finding one, talons scratching smooth slick stone.

He went over the edge, plummeting some thirty-five feet before hitting a
slanting roof projection.

He bounced off it, falling another fifty feet or more, smashing into the
roof of a parked car, the crumpled roof cushioning his fall. Windshields
and rear windows shattered, crunching into smithereens.

The car's antitheft alarm still worked, mindlessly honk ing the horn and
flashing the headlights. Fluids gushed from underneath the vehicle.

On the roof, Marya reflexively returned to her human form. It took high
energy to maintain the vampire-bat phase, and it was easy for her to
slip back to her natural unnatural state.

She'd narrowly escaped being impaled on a radio antenna.

That would have been an appropriately macabre finish for a
twenty-first-century vampire!

She was jammed up against the antenna's base, keeping her from sliding
off the steeply pitched roof. She sat up, weak, pale, drawn, and aching.

Somewhere below, a horn kept honking, blatting away.

Marya stuck her head over the roof's edge, looking down.

Glendon was nowhere in sight. The werewolf was loose in Visaria, on a
full-moon night.

Marya sighed. The morphing had taken a lot out of her. She'd need to
feed immediately to soak up some lost strength and power up.

At least Denise wouldn't go to waste.

"I'll experiment on her," Marya said, fangs bared. "And as for Glendon
..."

Werewolves are hard to kill.

The shapeshifting power that can transform a human into a hybrid
man-beast-fiend protects against most of the shocks that mortal flesh is
heir to. The power that morphs is resistant to cuts, punctures, and
burns, healing them almost immediately.

That's why after about a minute or so of rolling around in a daze on top
of the crushed car roof, Glendon jumped up and ran away.

He fled, leaving the Science Palace behind, that citadel of negativity,
fortress of foes. Marya Zaleska was unquestionably his most dangerous
enemy, a potent darkling thing. He'd known her for the queen vampire
that she was, and had jumped out the window with her knowing that she'd
have to assume bat form to save herself, and by doing so, carry him to
safety.

Things hadn't quite worked out according to plan, but he'd escaped, and
that was good enough for now.

He'd hurt Marya, but only enough to slow her down temporarily. He knew
better than to continue the attack.

More important, he knew that he had to get away.

The Science Palace was a stronghold with many reinforcements, human and
sorcerous, and best not tackled again until he'd a chance to sniff out
the best angle of attack. An irresistible instinct prodded him to put
some distance between himself and the citadel.

Where to? He was at the east side of the building, one of the short
sides. Its long north side fronted the square.

Not that way! The space was too open and exposed.

South of the Science Palace, terraces and park pavilions stepped down to
a parklike wharf bounding Lake Lorelei. That was slightly more
promising, but not much.

There were bushes and shrubs and statuary and other choice sites for
skulking and lurking, but not enough of them. It was too close to the
Science Palace, too.

A row of golden-yellow globes that were electric lamps stood on tall
slender posts lining the walkway bordering the lake's edge. He shunned
the lake. He had a reflexive aversion to the water, possibly because he
was a land animal and it cut off one whole avenue of escape.

To the west were hills lined with rows of residential buildings, modular
interlocking blocks of multiunit dwellings, interspersed with bands of
yards and woods.

To get there, he'd first have to traverse the entire length of the
Science Palace's south face, and that was more exposure than he cared to
risk at this time.

His pointed ears twitched, hearing the sounds of alarms and commotion in
the Science Palace, doors slamming open and shut, running feet, shouts.

He ran to the southeast, angling past the short south face of a building
fronting the east side of the square. It was some kind of administrative
office building. Lights showed through the windows but there were only a
handful of cars in the parking lot For an instant he thought of trying
the element of surprise, by invading this building. His enemies might
not think to look for him so close to home. But the vampire would
probably be able to sniff him out there, he thought unhappily. Her power
was strong. Besides, the building was too confined, too much of a trap.
He'd only just broken out of one and wasn't so eager to put himself in
another.

Perhaps it was just an impulse of the beast, not to go to ground but to
run free.

He ran. He ran low to the ground, with a curious loping motion that
covered a lot of ground quickly, his arms swinging.

A couple of people, office workers, had just exited the building and
were starting down a path to the parking lot when they saw Glendon in
the middle distance. They couldn't see him too clearly, but what they
did see froze them in place.

At the Science Palace, search parties fanned out into the night, away
from the building.

Glendon scuttled away, making for the lakeside park.

The effects of his captivity, drugging, battle, and breakout were as if
they'd never been. His body hummed with raw power. He exulted in it. It
was good to be strong and wild and free, prowling by moonlight!

Triumphantly he raised his fists, shaking mem at the moon.

The call of the wild was overpowering. He threw back his head and
howled, then dashed away.

The chase was on.

It was late winter in Visaria, but here under the north range of the
Alps, no matter how sunny it got during the day, at night the
temperature was below freezing.

Glendon welcomed the brisk biting cold. It was refreshing.

The frosty night air helped cool him off. Werewolves put out a lot of
body heat.

Steamy breath streamed from gaping flattened nostrils and twisted mouth
as he scampered along, seeking the dark, shunning the light. But then,
darkness was bright to him. With his expanded senses, the moonlit scene
was nearly day-bright, though it was more or less colorless, all silver,
gray, and white, and inky black where shadows were thickest. By
contrast, ordinary street lamps glared white-hot.

Ducking behind a tree, he glanced back.

In the square, a line of white cars with flashing blue roof lights
converged on the Science Palace. Instead of sirens, they had Klaxons,
blatting their ah-oogahs through the night, like a fleet of midget
submarines preparing to crash-dive.

Police.

Of course the police would be in on this. They took then- orders from
the Science Palace.

Watching the play of blue and white lights, he laughed, or tried to.
What resulted was more snarl than laugh, but what did he care?

It'd take more than that to catch him!

Turning, he ran downhill through the park, along a winding stone path,
his bare feet padding along the pavement.

There were lights along the path, too bright, so he left it, running
across bare ground, skirting the edge of the light.

The soles of his pawlike feet were sheathed with thick tough pads of
hard-callused skin, allowing him to run barefoot with no discomfort.
Running barefoot through the park on such a frosty night was quite
intoxicating.

His course dipped into a hollow, then up the other side.

He cut northeast, away from the lake.

Through the trees, he could see some blue flasher lights sparking in a
great broad crescent as they followed the curving road from the Science
Palace to the lakeshore drive. The road went the long way around the
park, while he took a shortcut, running straight through it,
outdistancing his pursuers.

When he reached the far end of the park, the police cars were still out
of view. The ground leveled out, edging a broad straight avenue. Across
the street, there were office and apartment buildings.

He dashed across the street, oblivious of oncoming traffic, what there
was of it. Not many vehicles were on the roads, not counting the police.
Reaching the curb, he rounded a corner and ran down a cross street.

The long narrow street was lined on both sides by boxy, minimalist
apartment dwellings, brick cubes with windows and doors, curbs lined
with parked cars. Street lamps were spaced on alternate sides of the
street, their neatly shaped frosted glass bulbs resembling little pearl
onions.

No pedestrians. He had the sidewalks to himself. He reached an
intersection and ran faster, racing across the traffic square.

Headlights outlined him. The driver of an oncoming car hit the brakes,
then the horn, tires squealing. Glen don leaped for the opposite corner,
a broad leap that sent him springing to the sidewalk, landing in a
crouch with his talons touching the concrete.

He growled at the vehicle, which had braked to a stop nearby. The driver
suddenly sped up and drove away.

Maybe he'd gotten a good look at Glendon, or maybe the growling had
gotten to him. He zoomed away, his car's taillights a dwindling red
blur.

Glendon turned, continuing east. There was the smell of water ahead, not
the lake but the river, or a branch of it. The street abruptly ended,
blocked by a canal that met it at right angles. A low-railed footbridge
crossed to the other side. The canal was lined with an eight-foot-tall
black metal chain-link fence, spanning it uninterrupted except for a gap
allowing entry to the footbridge.

It was a little pedestrians-only narrow arched bridge with waist-high
iron balustrades and a wood-planked floor.

It was uncovered, and barely wide enough to allow two persons to pass
abreast

On the near side, three broad curved shallow stone steps linked bridge
to sidewalk. To one side of the stairs stood a lamppost, shedding a wan
yellow cone of watery brightness.

In its glow was a woman in her twenties, wearing a ponytail, too much
makeup, a dark belted trench coat, and knee boots.

In one hand she clutched the straps of a plastic carrying sack from a
convenience store, bulging with some fresh-bought items. She stood on
the stairs, her free hand resting lightly on the curved handrail as she
stood poised to step down.

She must have been preoccupied with her own thoughts, and assumed she
was alone, for when she looked up and saw a stranger standing nearby, a
strange man, she started.

He was strange, but no man, not quite. He stood across the street from
her, hunched forward, red-eyed, claw hands curling.

Even by the street lamp's wan glow, die color could be seen draining
from her face, which turned dead white, with staring eyes and gaping
mouth.

Murder lust seethed in Glendbn's brain. He wanted that sweet young flesh
so bad he could taste it, and he would, right down to the entrails.

Headlight glare washed over them, from a car approaching from behind
Glendon. He looked back, to see how close it was. Not very.

When he turned back to the bridge, he saw the plastic sack lying on the
ground, spilling cans of food and bottles from its mouth, where the
woman-prey had dropped it

Dropped it and ran. She was already halfway across the bridge when
Glendon started after her.

A fast-moving fiend, he took the stairs in one bound, grasping the iron
handrail to haul himself up onto the bridge, exploding off the mark in
pursuit

Below, the frigid waters of the canal were as hard and black and
unyielding as shiny black coal.

She didn't waste her breath screaming but saved it for running. Her
boots had three-inch heels but she ran on her toes, gliding across the
bridge's wooden-planked floor.

It was a short bridge. She neared the far side. Glendon was right behind
her, little more than a length away, and closing fast She reached the
bridge's end and ran down the stairs, into the street She tripped and
fell heavily, sprawling on the stones, crying out

The area on mis side of the canal was different from the other side,
seedier, the street lamps dimmer and the surroundings dingier.

The footbridge opened on a T-shaped intersection. On the corner on the
right was a neighborhood tavern or beer garden with sooty orange
windows. Not-so-muffled noise came from within.

Outside, two men stood in front of the place, yammering away at each
other, not knowing or caring what the other was saying or if they were
going in or coming out or what. Drunks.

From what he could remember of the world of men, it seemed a bit early
for drunkenness, but maybe in Vis aria, the drunks got loaded early in
the evening, not wanting to go about too late at night The fleeing woman
spilled into the street, and after a pause the drunks turned their heads
and looked at her.

They weaved, one of them shouted something unintelligible at her. He
wore a Tyrolean hat with a tufted feather in the hatband.

They hadn't seen Glendon yet.

A police car came whipping around the corner, Klaxon blaring that
ah-oogah noise, blue flashers crackling, tires squealing. Coming
seemingly from out of nowhere, it stopped short to avoid hitting the
woman where she lay sprawled in the street.

In the air was the sharp stink of scorched brake linings, burned rubber
tires, hot engine oil, and reeking exhaust fumes.

The car stopped short, doors flinging open, feet hitting the pavement.
In the car were two uniformed police officers, Blick and Tanzel. Tanzel,
the driver, was the older of the two, jowly and thick-bodied. Blick was
trim and athletic, with crewcut hair so blond hair it was almost white

They piled out of the car, wearing short dark leather jackets, brown
uniforms, Sam Browne belts, and those fussy little round conductor's
caps with the stiff-visored brims that somehow always make one think of
fascist regimes. In Visaria, that might not be too much of a stretch.

Buttoned-down holsters were snapped open, as Blick and Tanzel drew their
nine-millimeter automatic pistols.

At least the Klaxon had stopped, silencing the ah oogahs.

The policemen wasted no time on preliminaries, immediately taking cover
behind their vehicle's open doors, shooting over the woman's ' at
Glendon. They must have gotten the word about him from the Science
Palace.

Tanzel laid down covering fire while Blick came out from cover to grab
the woman, half dragging, half carrying her to safety.

So they thought.

Glendon leaped from the top step of the bridge to the pavement, then
jumped up on the hood of the police car.

His black hunching shape was outlined against the strobing blue
emergency flasher lights, moving fast.

Blick and the woman were all tangled up on the pavement, since she'd
returned to consciousness squirming and thrashing in his grip when she'd
seen the werewolf come hurtling forward. Blick was blocked from shooting
at Glendon, who dropped out of sight, throwing himself on Tanzel,
crouching behind the driver's-side open door.

Tanzel screeched, banging off a shot at the werewolf and missing as he
came crashing down.

Glendon crushed him to the stones, crunching him un derfoot, squatting
on his chest. The other's bared quivering throat was taut, exposed.
Glendon struck a blow with his taloned hand, ripping the throat out.

Glendon hopped to the pavement, hefting Tanzel to his feet as the
mortally wounded man gurgled, his neck fountaining.

Glendon picked him up and threw him across the top of the roof at Blick.

Glendon went for Blick and the woman. Not going over the top of the car,
or around it, he went through it, ducking through the driver's-side
door, scrambling across the front seat, and jumping out the
passenger-side door to emerge on the sidewalk.

He rushed Blick and the female. Blick shot him, pumping slugs into his
torso at point-blank range.

Glendon was hit in the chest. Jackhammer blows pulped his chest,
pile-driving through it, doing awesome internal damage. It wasn't so
much painful as annihilating.

He was thrown back, crashing against the car.

He looked down. His chest was shattered, with the hair around the entry
wounds scorched and flaming. Parts of his hairy pelt were on fire. His
lungs felt as if they were on fire, filled with superheated blood. He
was drowning in his own blood!

He gasped for air, blood bubbling from his sucking chest wounds.
Drowning in his own werewolf's blood!

He hadn't thought he could be hurt by the weapons of mortal men.

He fell back, collapsing behind the back of the police car, hitting the
street. Blick held the smoking pistol with one hand, clinging to the
woman, who clutched him for support. They leaned against each other,
each helping the other stay upright.

Tanzel was stretched across the car roof, hanging up side down off one
side, his legs caught in the emergency flasher's roof rack holding him
in place.

The car engine's idle was set too high, running with a frantic whirring
noise. Blood from the dead man's severed throat spattered red on the
pavement.

Blue lights still flashed, blue lightning minus thunder.

On the corner in front of the beer garden, the two drunks still stood
where they were, staring, shocked into silence. Behind them, others in
the tavern cautiously stuck their heads past the door frame, trying to
see outside without showing too much of themselves.

The drunk in the Tyrolean hat shouted something, but Blick didn't get
it--it was too garbled, and besides, there was no time to attend to the
garbled mournings of drunks.

Tyrolean Hat became more agitated, yelling louder and carrying on more
wildly, making grotesque faces and spastic gestures. When he paused for
breath, his fellow drunk pointed at the werewolf in the street and said,
"He's moving."

Glendon pulled himself to his feet/ He'd been right after all. Mortal
weapons, guns and bullets, were no real match for him, not for long. It
had hurt like hell, but already his body was fast-healing, reknitting
itself.

Objects were expelled from the entry wounds in his chest, striking the
pavement with metallic pinging noises.

Bullets, the smashed and deformed lead slugs that had been pumped into
him, now lay on the street, glistening wetly.

Bullet holes started sealing themselves up.

Grinning, Glendon shifted his weight, poised for a pouncing leap that
would bury his talons in Blick's guts.

On the other side of the canal, an unmarked SUV braked in front of the
footbridge, disgorging a band of hunters from the Science Palace. They
raced across the bridge, the point man shouldering a rifle dart gun and
aiming at Glendon.

Glendon moved as the trigger was pulled, simultaneous with the cough of
compressed air. He ducked, the trank dart whizzing past him.

He lusted to slay Blick and take the woman, carrying her off to
somewhere private, some quiet alley or cul-de sac or thicket of woods
where he could take his time and indulge himself in taking her apart.

But there were more hunters from the Science Palace making their way
across the bridge, and more police cars closing in, and he was still not
fully recovered from the wounding.

So he ran away, giving them the slip.

Later, after he'd gotten clear away, he felt a bit chilly in the frigid
night air, so he set fire to an orphanage to keep himself warm.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the West Indies, on the island of
Isla Morgana, it was another sunny day. The island's principal products
were sun, sea, tourism, gambling, sugarcane, fishing, and zombies.

Within the last few days, the zombie master's power had broken. Since
then, a giant vampire bat had flown, a monster walked, and zombies slew
the living. Now it was everyone for themselves and devil take the
hindmost.

On the eastern side of the isle, sited on a natural harbor partly
enclosed by a pair of curved pincerlike reefs, lay its principal city
and capital, Magdalena. Down by the waterfront, on the landward side of
the coastal highway, lay the shantytown, a warren of shacks where the
teeming poor made their homes.

To the north was the city proper, centered by a fine old Spanish
colonial-style zocalo, or town plaza, lined by handsome stone buildings
with green copper mansard roofs, their smooth-plastered walls trimmed
with ornate black iron grillework, balconies, French doors, and gal
leries. The buildings were pastel-painted, pale yellow, mustard, tan,
off-white, rose-pink, and sky-blue.

As the tourist brochures liked to crow, it was another sunny day in
Magdalena, but the sun was having a tough time shining through the pall
of smoke from the burning caused by the riots that were sweeping the
island.

A good part of Shantytown had gone up in flames, consuming the crude
overcrowded huts of the poor and their threadbare possessions. More
spectacular blazes were caused by the torching of the canneries and
warehouses down by the docks, which the mobs had looted and then burned.

The casino had been pillaged and burned, but apart from the property
damage, that was small loss. The real plundering had come earlier, when
the first maddened mobs had broken the police barriers penning them in
their district. At the first sign of trouble, the casino operators,
big-time gamblers and crime-syndicate members from Miami, Santo Domingo,
Mexico City, Guyana, and Venezuela, had absconded with the house bank,
fleeing in the high-speed yachts and seaplanes that were kept moored at
the casino's own private pier.

The Guardia Civil, the island's paramilitary police force, justly famed
and feared for its brutality, was the logical choice to stamp out the
rebellion.

But the Guard's problems were a main reason for the rebellion.

Above the city, sited on a cove on the curving inner arm of the harbor,
commanding a view of it, stood Sea guard Castle. Built by the
conquistadores four hundred years earlier to repel and overawe the
pirates of the Spanish Main, the thick-walled fort had been the
headquarters of the island's notorious police force, holding their bar
racks, armory, motor pool, and administrative offices. Its ancient but
serviceable torture chambers and dungeons were still used for the
detention, interrogation, and abuse of prisoners. Below, the
shark-infested waters were the castle's graveyard.

But there had been a terrible calamity at the fortress, some unexplained
but sinister disaster that had decimated its defenders, dealing a
crippling body blow to the authorities.

"Police" is an ambiguous term at best, in this case, since these police
were a paramilitary operation whose high-ranking officers had
near-unlimited power over the lives of those who fell into their
clutches.

Whatever had happened there during the previous night had left many
Guard troops dead and had wrecked part of the castle. It was believed
that there had been some sort of explosion in one of the inner
structures, but no outsiders cared to approach it close enough to see
for themselves. Seaguard was a place to avoid even at the best of times,
one of the many evils of the island that the wise pretended not to
notice.

That there had been some sort of a collapse was evident from the
gray-brown cloud of dust, debris, and grit, which had issued from the
castle sometime around dawn, powdering the overgrown green slopes around
it with ash colored dirt.

Between the dust clouds and the smoke of burning from the waterfront, a
kind of midday dusk had settled over the island's east coast.

Fat black flakes of soot and other partially burned debris drifted down
like soft black rain on on the plaza. The streets were largely deserted.
Most of the town's wealthier citizens had fled at the first signs of
trouble, precip itating a mass exodus by sea and air. Many of those who
stayed were forted up in their homes and businesses, to defend them from
the free-roving bands of looters and rioters who were filtering in from
the dockside area.

At Magdalena's best hotel, the manager had made a futile effort to board
up the lobby's front windows, using shutters and plywood sheets stored
in the cellars for use during hurricane season. But at the first sign of
trouble, most of the staff had deserted their posts, after first
stealing all they could carry out with them.

One of the lobby windows was broken, where a stray vandal--a disgruntled
staffer, perhaps--had thrown a trash can through the pane of glass. Some
couches and armchairs had been moved up to the broken window to serve as
a kind of barricade. The smashed window let in the smoky, hazy air from
outside, which left a film of filth on the hotel's first floor. There
was no point in running the overhead fans, since they only sucked more
smoky air into the space.

The manager, Sefior Delgado, was short and wide bodied, with wavy inky
hair and a mustache and goatee combination as sleek and plush as a
sable-hair paintbrush.

What few staffers remained, including the hotel restaurant's chef and
his wife, were mostly foreigners with no family on Isla Morgana and
nowhere to flee. They and a dozen or so hotel guests who for various
reasons had missed the great exodus and were now stuck on the island,
were gathered on the ground floor, in the lobby.

Among the guests were a Belgian industrialist, his wife, and their
lumpish teenage son and daughter. There were a pair of businessmen from
Mexico, with smooth placid faces and anxious eyes, both dressed in brown
suits and yellow ties. There were a handful of others, including a
middle-aged Canadian couple and some Gulf Coast speculators who'd been
sleeping off a drank somewhere while the mass of tourists and foreigners
had evacuated the island.

Also present were two U.S. citizens, Jax Breen and Julie Evans.
Superficially, they resembled typical well heeled American tourists.
Their true and secret allegiance lay with no country or national
government, but with the devil cult headquartered in Visaria, to which
they were wedded unto death and beyond, body and soul.

Of medium size, Jax Breen had a big head and small, rounded shoulders,
so that his head seemed like a cutout that had been pasted to somebody
else's smaller, neater body.

He had an expensive short neat haircut, tinted sunglasses, a
tropical-weight sport coat, open-necked sport shirt, khakis, and
loafers. He wore a Swiss watch and Italian-made loafers.

Julie Evans was physically larger and more powerful than her companion,
a full-bodied Amazon, with a big shaggy mop of bronze-colored hair with
gold highlights, and a rich reddish-brown deep tan, like cordovan
leather.

Her eyes were brown with gold flecks and heavy lids. Her heavy-lidded
eyes and wide, full-lipped mouth gave her face a sleepy, sensual look.

She had a swimmer's build, marathon swimmer, with broad shoulders, a
narrow waist, and long, strong legs.

She wore a coral-colored short-sleeved silk blouse, high waisted khaki
pants with plenty of oversized cargo pockets, and white sandals with
three-inch heels.

Jax Breen and Julie Evans stood looking out the broken front lobby
window at the plaza. Smoke clouds drifted across the scene. In the
distance, about a hundred yards away at the mouth of a street opening
onto the plaza, a handful of tattered figures edged cautiously into
view, feeling their way.

From somewhere out there came sporadic sounds of shooting, sounding like
distant firecrackers. Breen struck a casual pose, idly cleaning his
fingernails with a daggerlike letter opener that he'd liberated from the
front desk.

Delgado, the hotel manager, said, "Better not show yourself too much in
the window, Senor Breen, someone may take a shot at you."

Breen said, "The shots sound like they're coming from the harbor."

Delgado, not necessarily convinced, stood to one side of the window, out
of any potential line of fire.

Julie Evans said, "More people are starting to show themselves in the
street."

"This may not be so good," Delgado said, sticking his head past the edge
of the window frame for a better view.

Outside, at the opposite end of the plaza, more stragglers edged
forward, forming a fair-sized crowd.

Delgado said, "No, this is not good."

Breen unlimbered a cell phone. "I'll try Seaguard again."

He redialed the official phone number of the commander's office at the
castle headquarters of the Guardia Civil.

"Still no answer," he said. "I'll try Major Quantez's private number ...
Hmm, no answer there, either. I'll try the governor's office."

Delgado waved a hand dismissively. "The governor?

What can he do?"

"At least someone's answering the phone there.

Sir Hugo Stafford, the island's governor, was holed up in an
administrative building on the far side of the plaza, its outlines vague
and indistinct in the smoky haze.

"Hello? Sir Hugo?"

"This is Bywater, Sir Hugo's executive assistant," said the voice on the
other end of the line. "Who's this?"

"Jax Breen."

"Ah, yes, Mr. Breen. My apologies for not recognizing your voice."

Bywater knew Breen, as did all the inner circle of Isla Morgana's ruling
elite, because they knew he represented the interests of the Visaria
group, the real ruling power behind this magic isle.

"Let me speak to your boss, Bywater."

"Sorry, sir, but Sir Hugo is currently unavailable at this time. That's
why I'm speaking for him."

"Well, where is her Julie said, "Probably hiding under his desk."
Bywater said, "Sir Hugo has temporarily retired to a protective bunker
in the building's basement." Breen said, "Since when?"

"Quite recently, sir. The security personnel had some concern about the
governor's safety and decided to move him to a safer location.
Apparently the rioters have broken through the police lines and are
coming toward the city."

"I know. I can see them gathering in the plaza. Where's that police
protection we were promised?"

"I'm sure they're on the way, sir." "That's what Sir Hugo said two hours
ago!"

"I'm afraid that the current unrest has stretched the Guard's forces to
the limit, Mr. Breen. I've been unable to contact any of their
command-level officers myself.

Candidly, there seems to be some confusion about exactly who's in charge
over there.1'

"Great. That's just what you want in the middle of a riot. What about
Kearny? Is he there?"

"Mr. Kearny was here earlier this morning, but he left a few hours ago."

"Do you know where he went?"

"No, sir."

"Oh hell. Okay. Any extra police over there you can spare?"

"That's what your man Kearny was here trying to arrange, Mr. Breen.
Unsuccessfully, I'm sorry to have to say. Sir Hugo feels that they're
all needed to defend the building here."

"And he's in the bunker and can't be reached?"

"That is correct. The phones don't work through the bunker's thick
walls."

"What about you, Bywater? Anything you can do for us here? A couple of
Guards with guns is all we need."

"I only wish I could, sir. But my influence with the Guard is nil. I'm
alone in the governor's office with one lone Guard, if he hasn't
wandered off while I've been on the phone."

"If no escort is coming, maybe we should go to you."

"Oh, no! No, I wouldn't do that, sir. You're much safer inside the
hotel."

"I'm not so sure about that. But that's my problem.

Tell me something, Bywater, why aren't you in the bunker with your
boss?"

The other laughed politely. "Space in the bunker is at a premium, Mr.
Breen. Quite simply put, I don't rate. So, I might as well stay at my
post and carry on."

"Keep carrying on, then. When this blows over, we're going to need men
like you."

"Very kind of you to say so, sir."

"If there's any news, get in touch with me immediately, and I'll do the
same for you. Good-bye for now-- I hope," Breen said, hanging up.

No sooner had he broken the connection than his phone started twittering
with an incoming call.

Breen picked up. "Who's that? Kearny! I'd just about given you up for
lost."

Kearny said, "Some of the locals had us pinned down on the wrong side of
the Guard barricades, down by the docks. It got pretty hot there for a
while, before we managed to drive them off."

"Who's ''?"

"I'm with Obregon and some of his men."

"Obregon? The Guard's bookkeeper?" "The same," Kearny said. "He's in
charge of the whole outfit now."

"That accountant?!"

"Hey, he gets the job done. He's not exactly tenderhearted when it comes
to pulling the trigger, either, I can tell you that."

"Well, that's something."

"Listen, Breen, the whole command echelon of the Guard is gone. Major
Quantez and his clique of young officers haven't been seen since last
night, and the word is that they're long gone from the island. A lot of
the upper ranks and noncoms were lost hi the cave-in at the castle.

"Obregon's only a lieutenant, but he's now the highest ranking officer
in the chain of command. Besides, the rank-and-file Guards trust him,
which counts for plenty.

He was a financial officer, so they figure that at least he'll be able
to get them paid."

"We'll go into that later. Where are you now?"

"On the highway south of town, with a squad of Guards and a couple of
Jeeps."

"How soon can you get to the hotel?"

"Ten, fifteen minutes."

"Make it sooner."

"We're on the way."

Breen hung up, dropping the cell phone into a jacket pocket. "The Guard
is on the way." Julie said, "They'd better get here fast. That crowd
outside is getting bigger. And uglier."

Breen turned to Delgado. "Do you have a gun?"

"A gun!" Delgado looked scandalized, as if he'd heard something
off-color.

Others nearby turned their heads to look at him. Dropping his voice to a
stage whisper, he said, "No! Why would I need a gun?"

Breen said, "Why does anyone need a gun? I don't know. To guard the
hotel silver or something."

"That's already gone--the servants stole it Guns are for the police. I
am a hotel keeper," Delgado said. "And you? Have you a gun?"

"Me? No."

"Well, then, there you are." Delgado held his hands out, palms up. "This
is a fine fix!" Julie turned, starting away from them. Breen said,
"Where're you going?"

"To the little girls' room," she answered. She crossed the lobby,
climbing three short steps to the central hallway, which cut
perpendicularly through the hotel's long axis. Grouped there was a small
knot of worried-looking individuals, peering through the ornate
glass-doored entrance into the plaza, where the noisy crowd was growing.

Julie went the other way, going deeper into die building, passing the
now-closed dining room on her right, then the main staircase, which
curved up to the second-floor mezzanine. Nearby stood a bank of two
elevators, brass birdcage types with open steelwork shafts.

Beyond, the wall was pierced by a row of tall windows, outside smoke
streamers drifting past the glass rectangles.

The intricately tiled floor rang to the smart tap-tapping sound of her
high-heeled sandals.

On the left was the closed door of the ladies' room.

Julie went in. The on-duty attendant had fled, taking all the soap and
towels with her. At least the plumbing still worked.

In the lobby, Delgado hovered at the windows, craning his neck,
squinting at the crowd scene from various angles. "What are they doing?
I cannot see when the smoke's blowing this way."

A faceful of smoke made his eyes tear and he moved away, choking back a
cough.

A slight, middle-aged man with a wizened face and wearing a porter's
uniform tugged at die manager's sleeve.

"I will go take a look outside, Seflor Delgado."

"All right, Emile, but be careful."

"I will be very careful, sefior."

Emile the porter went to the front entrance, straining against one of
die tall massive glass double doors, putting his weight into it as he
straggled to force it open. He ducked outside, instinctively crouching,
narrowing his stinging eyes as he looked around.

The plaza crowd was well on its way toward becom ing a mob. Ragged
shouts came up from them when the porter showed himself. Rocks were
thrown in his direction but landed far short

That was enough for Emite. He went back inside, avoiding Delgado, who
was looking elsewhere as the porter slipped past him. The porter
scurried down the central hallway in the opposite direction, making for
the rear of the building.

Julie Evans came out of the ladies' room, stepping back into the hall in
time to see Emite making for the tear exit. She paused, watching him.

Unaware that she was there, and with every evidence of haste, the porter
unlocked the door and opened it, going outside.

A few beats later Emile returned, walking in backward, holding his hands
up. Through the door after him stepped three men, sailors who'd jumped
ship here hi port and had turned to small-time crime and thuggery. With
a riot now on, these opportunists had decided to graduate to die big
time.

The point man, a heavyweight, wore a white yachting cap, blue denim
shirt, and dark blue bell-bottom jeans.

He held a bottle of rum in one hand and a machete in the other, which he
waved menacingly in the air near the porter. He staggered, lurching.

Behind him came a husky youth with short yellow white hah- and round
baby-blue dreamy eyes in a flushed red face. He held a gun.

The third was tall, storklike, with a black-and-white striped shirt, a
rope belt, white canvas pants cut off below the knees, and bare feet A
carpenter's claw hammer was stuck in his rope belt He had a bottle in
each hand.

The point man slashed at Emite, who was still back ing up, hands raised
defensively in front of him. The machete struck his hand, cutting it
Emile recoiled, shrieking, staggering, his hand all bloody. The machete
man grinned foolishly, proudly, showing a mouthful of strong white
teeth.

Emile backed into a wall, holding his wounded arm at the elbow, staring
at it, wailing. The big-boned dreamy eyed blond youth surged forward,
holding a pistol at waist height. He banged merrily at the porter,
shooting him a couple of times in the middle.

Emile crumpled to the floor.

No longer dreamy, the shooter's eyes were bright, excited.

Julie Evans stepped back into the ladies' room, closing the door behind
her.

The invaders ran down the hall, whooping and hollering, footsteps
pounding. They stopped in front of the ladies'-room door and it was
flung open and in crashed the blond gunman, his pistol smoking.

He said, "Peekaboo! I know you're in here, bitch, so no hiding--" "Who's
hiding?" Julie said, stepping into view from behind the far end of the
stall. She held one arm extended, holding a small automatic pistol
pointed at his head.

He said, "Put away that popgun before you get hurt"

Before he could lift his gun, she shot him in the eye.

The slug burst the eyeball, drilling a hole through his head. He fell
backward through the open doorway, into the hall. His gun clattered
loudly when it hit the tiles, but failed to go off.

Julie's gun's report had a sharp snap, like the tip-tap of her heels on
the tiles as she moved forward.

In the hall, Delgado, Breen and some others had rushed to investigate
the commotion, only to come up short at the sight of three drunken
maniacs and Emile lying in his own gore.

Now there was one maniac less.

Standing outlined in the doorway, Julie shot the machete man as he
rushed toward her, weapon upraised. He fell, machete clanging like a
gong when it hit the tiles.

The storklike man glanced at the blond giant's gun, deciding against
making a grab for it. He turned tail, running toward the exit door,
still holding a bottle in each hand.

Julie let him get far enough to make it interesting, then she shot one
bottle, shattering it to bits. The fugitive stumbled forward. She shot
the second bottle. Then she shot him.

Turning to Breen, Delgado said, "You said that you had no gun?" Breen
said, "I don't. She does."

"Remarkable!"

"That's why she's my associate. I don't like guns. They scare me!"

One of the Gulf Coast businessmen thrust his face at Julie Evans, said
accusingly, "That man was running away.

You killed him in cold blood!"

Glancing coolly at him, Julie shucked the empty clip out of her gun,
replacing it with a fresh one that she pulled from one of her numerous
cargo-pants pockets.

The gun had also been hidden in one of those pockets.

Breen bent over to pick up the blond youth's gun.

Holding it casually, he said to the businessman, "Maybe you'd've liked
it better if he got away, to tell his friends outside how his buddies
had gotten killed?"

One of the businessman's companions said, "Yes, Harve, try not to be
more of a horse's ass than usual, for God's sake. I know you've got
compassion for the downtrodden and all that, but we're not out of the
woods yet."

The man called Harve looked down at the two bodies, shaking his head
forebodingly. "This is bad, very bad."

Julie Evans started down the hall, toward the rear of the hotel.
"Somebody better go lock that door."

Delgado called after her, "What--what about Emile?"

"Nothing to be done for nun. He's dead."

Julie went to the back door. Looking outside, she saw some suspicious
looking characters lurking out in the garden grounds, in small surly
groups, eyeing the hotel with no love and her with less.

She snapped off a quick shot, chipping the nose off a statue, a fountain
cherub.

The lurkers all ducked for cover.

Stepping back inside, she closed the door and locked it Breen handed the
big gun to Delgado, who took it without thinking, then did a double take
when he realized what he had. Breen started toward the front of the
hotel.

Delgado called, "Wait! What am I to do with this?" Breen said, "That's
your problem. I told you, I don't like guns."

Out front, in the plaza, a group of about a hundred people, mostly men,
began breaking shop windows farther down the street Two-by-fours smashed
the wind* shields of parked cars. A fight started when a throng got in
each other's way at the door of a shop, a bottleneck of looters.

Some enterprising souls solved the problem by smash ing in the front
display windows, huge oversized glass shards as big as cafeteria trays
falling down like guillotine blades.

Rioters clambered through the newly made entrances, some inflicting
major cuts and damage on themselves in their greed for plunder.

Two Guardia Civil Jeeps rolled into the plaza, halting in front of the
hotel.

Breen said, "Here comes the cavalry, just in time."

The Jeeps were filled with heavily armed guards and one
sepulchral-looking civilian. The last was a skull-faced man with glasses
and hunched vulpine shoulders, wearing a natty Panama hat and a filthy
and incredibly wrinkled white linen suit.

That was Kearny.

The Jeeps were tan with black trim. One of them was mounted with a
.50-caliber machine gun.

The restless crowd shouted angrily, with much shaking of fists and
waving of clubs and torches. Some shots were fired from handguns, none
getting too close to the Jeeps. A bullet hit one of the glass-slab front
doors, starring it.

In the lead Jeep, the one with the machine gun, was Obregon, the leader,
round-faced, plump-bodied in his Guardia officer's khaki uniforms. He
said, "Prepare to open fire."

The weapon stood in the rear of the Jeep, mounted on a raised gunpost.
The gunner stood upright in the back of the Jeep, lightly holding the
twin handgrips of the machine gun.

Kearny was in the Jeep, too. He said, "May I?"

Obregon looked at him from under a stiff-visored cap pulled low over his
forehead. "Pardon?"

Keamy indicated the machine gun. "I'd like to take a try, please."

Obregon was cautious, unsure whether or not the other was serious. "You
want to shoot the machine gun?"

"Love to!"

After a pause, Obregon shrugged. "Why not?"

"Thanks! I'm awfully grateful."

Kearny rose, standing beside the Guard manning the gun. The Guard looked
questioningly at Obregon. Obregon said, "He wants to shoot, let him
shoot."

The Guard nodded.

"Wait," Obregon added. He climbed out of the Jeep, stepping down on the
pavement in front of the hotel, behind the machine-gun barrel. The
others in the Jeep followed, joining him on the sidewalk, except for the
gunner, who remained standing beside Keamy and the weapon.

The Guards in the other Jeep decided that they'd better play it safe,
too. They dismounted, making sure they were out of the machine gun's
range.

In the hotel, watching, Breen said, "What's Keamy up to now? He's always
playing."

The gunner started to show Keamy what to do, but the other waved him
off, saying, "Oh, I know how to use one of these."

The gunner looked dubious, but moved aside for Kearny to take his place
at the weapon. Not so far aside that he couldn't take over fast if there
were any screwups.

Keamy stood holding the handgrips. Looking over his shoulder, he said,
"Okay to shoot?"

Gesturing toward the crowd, which had worked itself up to a frenzy,
Obregon said, invitingly, "Please."

Thumbing the firing studs, Kearny cut loose with the weapon, firing
bursts into the crowd, spraying them.

The machine gun racketed, like a loud lawn mower revving up. Ricochets
whistled off the stones, glass shattered, gun smoke jetted from the
weapon.

There was lots of screaming, but only from those in the rear of the
crowd. About two dozen people who'd been at the front now lay sprawled
bleeding on the street and sidewalk, some dead, others seriously
wounded.

There was blood, screams, pandemonium. Those who could do so, fled. In
seconds, the plaza was emptied of all but the wounded and the dead.

"Not bad," the gunner said grudgingly.

Some of the less seriously wounded tried to crawl away. Kearny stitched
them with lead, sieving them and causing still more red stuff to flow.

When the shooting stopped, Obregon said, "Please!

Don't waste ammunition."

Kearny said, "There's an accountant for you! tipping our body count from
wounded to killed increases our productivity.

There's your bottom line."

"Ah, but the same bullet can kill a private or a general, my friend. The
more important the target, the more cost-effective the round."

"I take your point." Kearny relinquished control of the weapon to the
gunner. He said, "Thanks, it was great fun."

He climbed out of the Jeep, lightly stepping down to the pavement. He
adjusted the angle of his hat. Gesturing toward the hotel, he said,
"Shall we?"

Obregon replied, "We shall."

Leopold, a tough veteran noncom who kept close to Obregon, stepped
forward. "Better let me go first, jefe."

Obregon nodded. Leopold drew a bolstered sidearm, then he and a guard
armed with an assault rifle went into the hotel. A moment later the
noncom gave the all-clear sign and Obregon and Kearny stepped inside.

Obregon's eyebrows lifted when he saw the three dead bodies in the hall.
"What happened?"

Breen said, "They tried to sneak out without paying their bill."

Obregon turned to him. "Ah, Sefior Breen, so good to see you again. I am
overjoyed to find you in such good spirits. Lieutenant Obregon, at your
service."

"You're too modest Major Obregon, I'd say."

"Pardon?"

"From what I understand, you're top man in the Guardia right now."

Obregon's hooded eyes were thoughtful, his moonface with its eyebrow
mustache smoothly unlined. "So?"

"So. When Quantez ran the Guards, he was a major.

Now you run them. From where I sit, that makes you major."

"An interesting way of looking at things, Senor Breen."

"Congratulations on your promotion, Major."

Obregon's polite smile was unreadable. Breen said, "By the way, you
wouldn't happen to know what happened to Quantez, would you?"

"I believe there was some mention of him and some junior officers having
been seen early this morning, loading a heavy chest onto a speedboat The
junior officers were found on the docks, shot dead. The speedboat and
Major Quantez were gone," Obregon said.

Sergeant Leopold eyed the blond giant's body. He said feelingly, "Right
through the eye. Nice shot!" Glancing at Breen, he said, "Your work?"

"No, Ms. Julie Evans's. She's our ace marksman."

Julie said, "You say the nicest things, Jax."

Leopold stroked his chin. "If all the Guards could shoot like that, we
wouldn't have the troubles we're having now with that waterfront scum."

"Other matters are more pressing," Obregon interjected.

"Matters that require your special expertise, Sefior Breen."

He and Breen exchanged significant glances. Breen nodded slowly, said,
"Yes, I know what you mean." Obregon said, "I fear the day is already
well along."

"Then let's not delay."

Obregon, Leopold, the gun-toting soldier Guard, Breen, Julie Evans, and
Keamy moved out in a group, heading for the front entrance.

Harve, the Gulf Coast businessman, pushed forward.

"Wait! What about the rest of us?" Obregon said apologetically, "I fear
that our vehicles will barely permit us to take our present group.
Besides, where we are going is less safe than staying here."

Harve indicated Jax Breen and his two associates.

"What about them? They're going."

"They are doing special consulting work for the Guardia, vital to our
island security."

"What about us? We're not safe here!"

"You are in no danger, senor. The rabble have already broken, now that
they've had a taste of gunfire. They'll run all the way home to their
dockside rat's nests."

"But what if they come back?"

"They won't Believe me, the insurrection is over.

That's not what we have to worry about."

"No? Then I'd like to know what you do worry about!" "Believe me,
sefior, you would not," Obregon said with conviction. "However, I'll
leave one of my men behind to guard you."

"Only one!"

"That is the best I can do."

The conversation was at an end. Obregon resumed his advance, Breen
falling into step beside him, followed by Julie Evans and Kearny, with
Leopold and the rifleman bringing up the rear.

Outside, Breen steered Obregon off to one side, away from the others.
Breen said, "Sir Hugo's out. He's useless."

"A point I would not care to dispute. But if he is out, who is in?"

"Bywater. He seems to know what he's doing."

Obregon tilted his head slightly to one side, thinking it over. Finally,
he nodded. "Yes, that could work."

"You run the Guard and he runs the government. Of course, he can't be
out front. That would look wrong, him going from Sir Hugo's boy to
governor in one jump, but he'll have the position in all but name. Put
some useful idiot in as a figurehead governor."

"I already have several candidates in mind. Our poor island is rich in
dunces."

"Good. Another thing. Sir Hugo should be neutralized now, before he
makes any trouble."

"I have no objection."

"That sergeant you've got with you--what's his name?

Leopold? He looks like he's not too tenderhearted."

Obregon nodded. "Leopold is the man for the job." Breen said, "My man
Kearny can go along. He's a sneaky little bastard and he gets results."

"Yes, I have had occasion recently to watch him work.

He is a most unusual fellow."

"He's a creep, but he does good work," Breen said.

"Leopold will be instructed to extend him full authority and
cooperation."

"Don't go overboard. Keamy has to be watched, otherwise he sometimes
gets carried away. We don't need a war-crimes investigation on top of
everything else."

"It shall be as you say, Senor Breen."

"While that's taken care of, Major, you and I will be able to
concentrate on our ... special problems."

Obregon and Jax Breen had the clout, so they got to go in the Jeep with
the machine gun. Breen said, "You won't need a machine gun to take Sir
Hugo."

"I know. I just like machine guns," Kearny said.

"I'll buy you one for your birthday. Get going."

Kearny and Leopold and some guards got into the other Jeep and drove
across the plaza, toward the government building. Obregon, Breen, Julie
Evans, the driver, and the machine gunner drove off in their Jeep, away
from the plaza.

The vehicle whipped and jounced through town, punching holes in the
smoke clouds. It struck out of the built up section surrounding the
plaza and picked up the coast highway north, skirting the harbor. Green
hills and cliffs rose on the west side of the road, and the gray-green
waters of the bay lay to the east

They passed the burned-out hulk of a minivan laying on the side of the
road. It was still hot.

The two-laned paved highway switchbacked up a rise, topping out on the
flat crown of the northern cape arm curving out to sea. The flat top was
no natural formation but had been leveled off as a site for Seaguard
Castle.

The walled fortress was a trapezoidal mass of masonry, monolitic blocks
piled high and thick, with sloping outer walls slitted by rows of
vertical gunports and battlements and stout corner turrets.

Once, heavy cannon had lined the ramparts, commanding a full view of the
harbor, the town, and the channel approach through treacherous reefs. No
wooden ship of the Age of Sail could have challenged those waters and
survived. Came the age of steam-powered ironclads and dreadnoughts, and
access to the fort ceased to be a decisive factor, causing the isle to
fall to the British, under whose rule it suffered centuries of
exploitation and imperialism, right up to the present.

Over time the fort had been adapted to the modem era.

The ramparts were fitted with rocket launchers and naval artillery guns
and heavy machine guns; there were banks of floodlights, powered by the
site's own generator. There were satellite dishes aimed toward the sky
and microwave towers.

At the moment the fort was wreathed in a miasma of stony brown dust,
gritty, powdered, irritating to the nose and the back of the throat.

But mat was better than the stink of the dead.

Bodies of soldiers lay at the foot of the walls, where they'd been cast
down from the heights.

Set in the castle's west face was the main entrance, a high rounded
archway opening into a dirt courtyard.

Guards posted at the gate waved the Jeep through. Nobody saluted. The
Guardia really wasn't that kind of outfit anyway.

Beyond die gate, die space was dominated by a central structure, a tall
square-sided stone tower. A heap of bodies lay piled up against a
rampart wall.

Breen said, "What happened?" Obregon said, "Monsters."

To one side of die main building was a clump of cabin sized wooden
buildings and some long barnlike sheds.

The Jeep parked by one of die cabins.

Obregon said, "The castle is unsafe, because of die floor collapse
and--other reasons. We have set up operations here, in these
outbuildings."

They got out of die Jeep. Obregon said, "What do you want to see first,
Sefior Breen?"

"The bodies." Julie Evans said, ' wait here. I've seen bodies." Breen
said, "You can smell diem from here."

He and Obregon crossed to die pile, not getting too close. There was an
infernal buzzsaw buzzing, caused by hordes of flies swarming the
corpses.

Breen said, "Those bodies will have to be taken care of. Burned."

"Our usual custom is to throw diem in die sea to die sharks. Of course,
that is for prisoners, and these are our own men."

"Not anymore. They're better burned. Fire will keep diem from coming
back as zombies or vampires. To be really sure, any of diose bitten
should be staked and have their heads cut off before burning."

Obregon frowned, pursing out his lips. "The men of die Guard may not
like die idea."

Breen scoffed. "Don't tell me they're squeamish!"

"No, greedy. And not a little scared."

"They'll be well paid, I guarantee it Money means nothing to the
interests I represent, when they're after something they want."

Obregon's frown relaxed. "That is good to hear. Money means everything
here on Isla Morgana."

"I've seen enough," Breen said. They moved away from the bodies, back to
the wooden cabins.

Jax Breen said, "The fort will have to be searched top to bottom, room
by room, to make sure we don't miss any bodies that might be infected.

"But that's secondary, compared to the things in the vault."

In the castle, at the edge of a pit, stood Obregon, Julie Evans, and
Breen. They were in the structure's great hall, a gloomy barnlike stone
space with tall narrow windows piercing both of the long walls. A
portable generator chugged, power cables stretching across the floor to
feed clusters of floodlights on metal stands.

The pit occupied a good part of the floor space. The hole went down
fifty or sixty feet, through different underground sublevels, into the
vaults below the foundation stones.

A couple of sentries were posted around the rim, watching the pit for
signs of movement.

Breen stood at the edge, looking down. Even with the floodlights, he
couldn't see much, just stone walls and floors crumbling into heaps of
blocks, mounds of rubble, with hints of what were once arches, pillars,
and beams.

There was lots of dirt in the air, billowing out of the hole. Breen took
a few steps back. He said, "Must've been some party."

Obregon moved beside him, his hands clasped in front of him. "Sefior
Breen, last night the monsters walked among us."

Breen looked at nun. "Tell it"

"Most of the Guards are like the rest of the island's common folk. They
know, or think mat they know, of the place back in the hills where
zombies are made, the valley of the zombies. But few if any of them have
ever actually seen a zombie.

"Only Major Quantez and a few other officers ever went into the hills,
to deal with the zombie master. I myself have never gone, nor will I.

The zombie master was a night creature--I do not say man--a night
creature calling himself Baron Latos.

A necessary evil, perhaps, on our peculiar isle. This baron had a slave,
a giant pieced out of dead bodies. You smile, sefiort "No."

"I tell you, I have seen it You will see it for yourself.

Down in the bottom of the pit, it is waiting for us. And the worst of it
is that it is not alone.

There are two of mem down there, the monster and Baron Latos. Baron,
night creature--vampire.

"Baron Latos lost control of his creature. The monster hates him, wants
to destroy him. Last night the monster came here looking for him.

The results--you have seen. The monster broke into the fort, killing
many guards. Near dawn, Baton Latos came here, to use a secret coffin
which he had hidden in the vaults. He and the monster fought, causing
the floor to collapse.

"And there they remain." Breen said, "Until sundown. The vampire,
anyway." Obregon said, "Perhaps they kilted each other."

The other laughed, a humorless bark. "Not those two!

They're hard to kill. But maybe they're pinned down there for now."

"So far as we know."

"The vampire won't come out in the light of day. But the monster would,
if he could. He hasn't, so we'll assume he can't.

"Not yet, anyway," he added.

"What do we do? What can we do, Seflor Breen?"

"Simple. Capture the creatures and take them away. In Visaria, they know
what to do with such things."

While they were talking, Julie Evans had wandered outside. Now she
returned to the vicinity of the pit, going to Breen.

She said, "A patrol just brought in a prisoner. A witch.

A real one." He said, "Anybody I know?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

The prisoner was being kept under guard in a cabin. The one-room
building was made of yellow pine-plank walls, floor, and ceiling. Even
with the windows and door open wide, it still smelled like pine-scented
cleanser.

Seated on a wooden folding chair was a slim young redheaded woman, with
green cat eyes and striking, perhaps too-sharp features. Her hair was
unkempt, she wore no makeup, her dress was torn and filthy.

Breen turned to Obregon. "This might be a good time for some privacy."
Obregon told the other Guards in the shack to get out.

When they had done so, Breen said, "Congratulations, Major. Here's the
catch of the day, so far. Where'd you find her?"

"A patrol was guarding die road into the Mils, to the valley of the
zombies. She came down from the plantation.

The plantation of Baron Latos."

"Know who she is?"

"The woman of the wizard, Basil Lodge."

"And a talented witch in her own right Dorian Winter." Dorian said, "I'm
not a witch, Breen, I'm a medium. I don't cast spells or fly around on a
broomstick, I'm merely a receiver for astral influences in the unseen
currents around us." Breen said, "Dorian, the astral radio receiver. It
sounds so innocent when you put it that way, but we know better.

Uncle Basil was no practitioner of white magic--he was an adept at black
magic and necromancy."

Obregon and Julie Evans went outside, leaving Breen alone with the
prisoner. He said, "Why are you here, Dorian?"

"I might ask you the same thing."

"I'll ask the questions. But I don't mind telling you that I've been
sent by the home office to clean up the mess that you and Lodge and
others like him have made."

"Good luck."

"Oh, we'll do it, and mere won't be any luck about it By the way, where
is dear old Uncle Basil?"

"Dead."

"Good news, if true."

"Oh, it's true all right You can see for yourself. What's left of him is
scattered all over the old mill at the plantation."

"What about Baron Latos? Of all people, a witch like you should know
better man to cast her lot with the likes of him."

That was Uncle Basil's idea, not mine."

"And the monster? Whose idea was that?"

"That was his idea, too. That is, resurrecting it."

"Quite a brainstorm."

"His last."

Breen reached out, putting a hand on her head and tilting it back,
stretching her neck. Through gritted teeth she said, "Ow, that hurts!"

"I want a clear look at your throat." He examined her neck.

She said, "If you're looking for fang marks, you won't find them."

"No?" He let go of her head. She sulked, rubbing the side of her neck
with her hand.

He said, "There's lots of other places to hide where a vampire put the
bite on you."

"Yes, and wouldn't you just love to look for them!" "Don't flatter
yourself," Breen said. He turned, went to the window, looking outside,
where Julie Evans stood talking with Obregon.

He said, "Shadows are getting longer."

She started. "What? What did you say?"

"It's late. Daylight's running out. Maybe we'll both be wealing fang
marks pretty soon."

"What--what do you mean?"

He leaned forward, pushing his face close to hers. "You know and I know
who Baron Latos really is."

"Yes," she whispered.

"He's here now, somewhere under our feet Him and the monster. The
monster I'm not so worried about, because unlike the vampire, he can
only kill you."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd seen what he did to Uncle Basil. I
loathed him, but to be torn limb from limb like petals plucked from a
flower!"

"Why? Why did the monster destroy him?"

"He used black magic to revive the monster, but during the ritual, he
accidentally broke the magic curie that protects the practitioner from
what he calls up. He was unable to control the monster, who then tore
him apart, literally.

"It was awful--ghastly!"

"I'd have liked to have seen that"

"Maybe you'll get a chance to experience it firsthand.

You think that you can control the monster."

"It's been done before."

"Yes, and he always manages somehow to bring doom to his would-be
masters, almost like it's a law of nature.

A cosmic law."

"Cosmic laws were made to be broken," Jax Breen said. "I don't like you,
Dorian. You're a fence-sitter, a neutralist You think you're above the
fight, that you don't have to take a side, that you can go your merry
way while the occult superpowers fight behind the scenes for mastery of
this world, and those beyond.

"Well, here's a bulletin. Your state of neutrality is over.

You're going to put your talents to work for the cause."

She sniffed, trying to look righteous and offended.

"Mediums don't respond to coercion. When you try to force the power, it
never works."

"Coercion's got nothing to do with it I've got the best motivator of all
working for me--self-preservation. You'll help and you'll do it gladly,
because just like the rest of us here, your own neck is on the block,
literally."

"How so?"

"Because of the vampire buried down there. What do you mink he'll do
when the sun goes down?

"How'd you like to be one of his ''? A witch like you, with your powers
of second sight, would be an invaluable tool for him. Once he puts the
bite on you, you're his, body and no-soul, his slave.

"What new-made vampire, even a vampire witch, could thwart the will of
the Undead Lord himself, Dracula?"

Breen indicated the door. "Now that mat's settled, let's get going. It's
getting late and there's no time to waste."

They went outside. Dorian glanced anxiously at the sun, at its position
in the sky. Julie Evans came over to them.

She and Breen were on either side of Dorian, all three starting toward
the castle. Breen said, "One more thing I was wondering about. You and
Uncle Basil were in with that cheap gangster, Soto. What happened to
him?"

"Dead." Julie said, "I don't believe you. She's lying, Jax. Look at
her."

Dorian said patiently, with an air of someone explaining something to a
child, "Solo's dead. There's no doubt about it. I saw him die."

Jax Breen laughed harshly. "Poor hoodlum! He was out of his class. What
could a mere gangster and killer for hire do when faced with the only
real underworld--hell."

"It was one of his own kind that got him, shot him in the back, dead."

Breen brightened. "I like it! With all the darkside dwellers running
around loose on the island--vampires, sorcerers, zombies, and
monsters--Soto gets blasted in time-honored gangland style. What a
finish!

"That settles that. Good. I don't like to leave any loose ends."

Obregon was fretful. "I am not one to tell you your business, Senor
Breen, but is this wise, letting a witch use her powers at this time, in
this place?"

The time was midafternoon, the place the castle's great hall, at the
edge of the pit, where Breen, Julie Evans, Dorian, and Obregon now
stood.

Obregon continued, "After all, it was sorcery that brought about this
current crisis, the sorcery of Senor Lodge, this witch's master. Why
should we trust her?" Breen said, "I don't trust her, I trust the
survival instinct.

She's got to help, if only to save her own skin."

"What can she do?"

"Before you go into battle, you want to know as much about the enemy as
possible--his strength, number of troops and their disposition,
reinforcements, and the like.

"Knowledge is power. Information about the enemy is the key to such
knowledge.

"She's our scout, going behind enemy lines. Only she won't be going
physically, she'll be going mentally, tuning in on our quarry."

Obregon frowned. "What you say makes sense, but I still do not like it
There's already been too much witchcraft and black magic in the air.
What's needed is not more, but less."

"Don't worry, Major. At the first sign of treachery, Julie will take
over and do what has to be done. Dorian's power won't survive a bullet
in the head.

"But if you don't want to be around while she's doing her thing, no
problem. Not many people like to be around witches."

Obregon shook his head. "I will stay. It is the responsibility of
command."

Jax Breen looked up at the windows in the long south wall. Earlier, when
the sun was higher, each tall slitted window had let in large rectangles
of bright, glowing sunshine.

Now that the sun was on the decline, the glow had sharpened and narrowed
into slanting shafts of sunlight that speared the dust haze rising
slowly from the pit.

Breen said, "Better have your men withdraw from the pit area, Major.
Dorian needs to concentrate, and her powers work better when there's
less people around to distract her. Plus, it's best not to let the lower
ranks get too close to occult technology."

The sentries who'd been posted to watch the pit had withdrawn to another
part of the hall, along with some other Guards. They didn't need to be
told twice to back off-- they were glad to go.

Jax Breen said, "Time for you to start earning your keep, Dorian. Make
like a medium and produce." Dorian said, "Quiet, please."

"They don't call them sensitives for nothing."

"Stop jabbering and let me concentrate."

Dorian closed her eyes, pressing her fingertips to her temples. Her
chest rose and fell with slow, deep breaths.

She blanked her mind, clearing it, a clean slate for whatever might fill
it. Second sight, clairvoyance, gave her the power to glimpse unseen
things in the material world and in the astral spheres mat surround and
penetrate it.

She swayed slightly, slowly, entranced, letting her awareness expand so
mat the walls of her skull seemed to dissolve, erasing the barrier
between the inside of her head and the world outside.

Groans, deep and mournful, began to rise from the structure around her,
the walls and floor, the very stones.

Soon wailing whirlwinds were whipping around in the far corners , the
earthbound spirits of those who'd died violently here and were unable to
depart.

Dorian stood with eyes closed, fingertips pressed to her temples,
quivering. In a leaden monotone, she said, "I ... hear."

Breen spoke softly, urgently. "What do you hear, Dorian'?"

"Screams of those tortured and killed in this place."

"Go deeper."

Pulsing veins stood out on the sides of her head. Her face was pale,
neck corded, body rigid.

Suddenly she staggered. Obregon reached to support her, but Breen
motioned him not to touch her. Dorian recovered her balance, steadying
herself, eyes still closed.

In her mind's eye, she was a living ghost, sinking down through the
floor stones, into the pit. Below the torture dungeons, into the lowest
vaults, amid piles of rubble and bones.

It was not dark here, deep beneath the earth. The scene shone with an
unnatural phosphorescent gleaming, corpse light.

More than once in the past, her talent as a medium had put her in
contact with the Undead. She'd touched the mind of a vampire, feeling
its dead flesh in restless, uneasy confinement in a coffin, racked with
an aching thirst and a dread of not being able to sate it, hearing worms
and death beetles crawl, graveyard rats scratch at its coffin lid, and
bats shriek.

Intimations of a weird figure in befouled formal wear, pinned under a
pile of earth and stones, filtered into her ghostly awareness. Dirt
filled his nostrils and open, fanged mouth, crushing him undo* its
weight, squashing him like a malignant toad.

But he seethed with blood and souls and malign occult power, so that she
had the impression of a volcano of darkness, spewing doom and
destruction with lavalike rage.

Dracula.

It was in his assumed identity as Baron Latos that the vampire had
conducted his dealings with Uncle Basil, who'd been careful to keep
Dorian away from Dracula.

But no one with her psychic abilities could help but experience him,
even at a distance. Dracula's supernatural power was so great that it
permeated the island's hind scape, like a dark star so dense that its
mere presence warped the atmosphere around it Now, though, she was
directly within his orbit

Then, as her awareness grazed that of the Undead, something brushed her
back. The mind's eye of Dracula opened, sucking her into it, thrusting a
tentacle of his awareness into her head and looking around.

For an instant she experienced a direct mind-link with the vampire. And
what a mind it was, an eternal riot of torture and murder in a charnel
house of fornicating, blood-drinking, cannibalistic living corpses.

The shock overloaded her neural circuits, causing her mind to blank out
for an instant and thus break contact

Her quivering awareness fled, withdrawing. In retreat, she caught quick
flashing impressions of a second evil entity, apart from Dracula, but
not too far from nun, fiery, hateful, relentless.

This entity, too, was no stranger to her. After all, she'd been present
at its creation, or at least its rebirth, when Uncle Basil's human
sacrifices to the demonic forces of fire and strain had caused the
Frankenstein monster to be reanimated..

Then, like a rubber band that has been stretched and suddenly let go,
her questing tentacles of perception snapped back, zooming up from
below, out of the pit, and back into her head.

She fainted.

When she was carried outside and revived, she was able to describe where
in the castle vaults Dracula and Frankenstein were buried.

The monster squad was made up of ten of the Guard's most hard-core
enforcers.

"Brutal killers all," Obregon said, with pardonable pride. "They are
what you call the shock troops." Jax Breen said, "That's good, because
there just might be some shocks."

"That is what they are being paid for."

The mercenary volunteers formed up outside the fort, under the castle
walls. From somewhere in the distance, far below seaside cliffs, came
the sounds of unseen surf.

The squad checked their hardware. They had guns, ropes, flashlights,
hard hats with built-in headlamps, spades, pickaxes, crowbars, and
chains.

Breen armed himself with a flat automatic pistol, un enthusiatically
stuffing it into the top of his waistband.

He stuck a grenade in each of his jacket pockets. "Plays hell on the
lining and pocket seams, but the jacket's already ruined.

"Too bad there's no flamethrowers. But machine guns, firebombs, and
grenades should be able to stop any human monster. And as for Dracula,
well, I know what to do with him."

He unfolded a piece of paper, on which according to Dorian's directions
he'd drawn a kind of crude floor plan of the vault area where the
creatures were entombed.

Obregon said, "Why not take the witch herself with you? That way, any
trickery she might have planned will fall on her first "Besides, her
powers might prove useful." Breen said, "A sensitive is a double-edged
sword. The vampire might be able to take over her mind and use her
against us."

"In the daytime?"

"It's daylight up here--at least for a while--but he's down below, out
of the light, belowground. He still won't be able to move, but who knows
how his hypnotic powers will be affected."

"What if he tries them out on you, or the men?"

"No worry about that. In daylight, only a medium can receive a vampire's
thoughts, and I don't think we'll find any sensitives in this crew of
cutthroats.

"No, Dorian's safer up here, with Julie keeping an eye on her."

Breen finished studying the layout, memorizing it before folding it and
pocketing it

He said, "Speaking of daylight, I noticed that last night the sun set
around eight-thirty p. m., with the last glow gone by nine. Playing it
safe, that gives us about five hours more or less to get the job done.

"Time enough, if nobody does something stupid." Obregon said, "The men
wiu do only what they're told."

"Great. Then we're okay as long as I don't do something stupid."

The sun was still high, though dulled by smoke haze.

The air was very still, with barely a breeze stirring. Dead calm.

The squad stood outside the fort, in a clearing in a thicket opposite
the northwest corner of the wall. Scattered nearby, yellowing in the
sun, were masses of green brush, which had been recently chopped from
the site to reveal an opening into the earth.

Sunk about a foot below the surface was the mouth of a circular shaft
thrusting straight down into the ground.

The shaft was lined with fitted blocks, showing every sign of extreme
age, hundreds of years old. A crude, narrow spiral staircase corkscrewed
along the inside of the shaft, going down.

Not far from the shaft was a large flat rock, big enough to cover the
tunnel mouth. Obregon toed the edge of the shaft, pointing downward.
"That's how the vampire Baron Latos got in. A secret entrance. They used
to put them in these old castles and forts as an escape route in case of
siege.

"This one is old, old enough to have been built around the same time as
Seaguard, almost four hundred years ago. It was a secret until today.

"We found it after some of our sentries were killed. It was hidden under
the brush. A trail of broken bushes pointed to it, and the stone lid was
partly opened. Not much, only a crack. It was by luck that one of the
men saw it.

"You see that stone lid, Senor Breen? It took five strong backs to lift
and move it. Yet when we found it, it was covering the tunnel, with only
a gap of a few inches showing.

"Now, if I am to believe that it was Baron Latos who passed this way,
and I do, that means that he lifted the stone by himself, climbed into
the shaft, and pulled the lid back over it." Breen said, "While the
sun's out, he can't hit so much as a finger. Let's go."

The squad mustered around the tunnel mouth.

Obregon said, "Since the castle floor fell in, this is the only way in
er out of the vaults."

A Guard stood at the lip of the shaft, checking his gear. Indicating
nun, Obregon said, "This one wants that extra five-hundred-dollar bonus
you are paying for the first man down the shaft. He will scout the area
and report back."

Breen said, "And if he doesn't return to report?" Obregon said, "Then we
will send down another scout.

But you will have to pay a bigger bonus."

The scout climbed down to the bottom of the shaft, entering an archway
that opened in its base. This was the entrance to a horizontal tunnel
that connected with the vaults. A second man descended the well,
standing in the shaft as a link between the scout and the men above.

After a wait that seemed endless to those on the surface, but which
lasted only about twenty minutes, the scout returned to report, shaken
but unharmed. There were dead men below, he said, Guards who'd been
killed earlier last night, when monsters had first invaded the vaults.

Of the monsters themselves, there were no signs.

An advance unit of three gunners climbed down the shaft and went through
the tunnel, securing the area at the far end.

The rest of the squad then began their descent. Obregon and Jax Breen
were in the middle of the group. The men went down one at a time. That
way, if anyone slipped and fell, only that person would risk injury.

After Obregon ducked into the portal at the bottom of the well and
disappeared, it was Breen's turn. Tightening his hard hat's chin strap,
he switched on the headlamp and climbed down into the mouth of the
shaft, edging along the spiral staircase with his back against the wall.

There was no handrail. He was glad he had both hands free to maintain
his balance on the damp, slippery stone stairs.

At the bottom of the well, he looked up, the mouth of the shaft a neat
hole framed by the bowed heads of those on the surface who stood around
it, looking in. They blocked much of the sky and light.

Through the archway, he could see Obregon lumbering through the passage,
about fifty feet ahead, the beam of his headlamp and flashlight marking
his course with a receding ring of light.

Breen entered the passage, ducking his head to keep from hitting it on
tunnel's arched roof. The floor was covered with a mucky mud-and-slime
mixture, several inches deep, causing his boots to make lewd sucking
sounds at every step. It stank, too.

Strands and beards of cobwebby stuff hung down from the roof. The tunnel
seemed longer than it probably was.

Breen was glad to emerge from the far end, into the space of the vast,
gloomy vaults.

The squad massed beyond the tunnel mourn. Obregon left two men behind,
to guard the retreat. They stood back-to-back, covering a 360-degree
field of fire. The others moved ahead, in single file. Some of them
carried long thin fiberglass poles, like fishing rods, which they could
stick into piles of earth and stone to probe for what might lay buried
beneath.

Obregon carried a pump-action riot shotgun. Breen was behind nun,
wielding a baton flashlight he'd borrowed from one of the men.

He said, "I hope nobody gets too trigger-happy. I'd hate to get shot by
mistake." Obregon said genially, "I am sure that when you get shot,
Senor Breen, it will be no mistake."

Breen studied the other. "I'm not sure how to take that."

"Just having my little joke. Do not worry. I run as much risk of being
shot as you do."

"That doesn't make me feel any better, but thanks just the same."

Stretching out from the space at the tunnel's edge was a series of stone
columns, square-sided pillars succeeding each other seemingly to
infinity. In the center space was a mound of rubble where a foundation
pillar had collapsed.

On the other side of the barrier lay the pit, sealed off to the
intruders.

They filed toward it. Clusters of support columns met in vaulted arches
to support the foundation ceiling above them. The ground was floored
with a layer of gritty gray dirt, like moondust. It crunched underfoot.

About midway to the pit wall, they came across a couple of dead bodies,
lying sprawled in pools of dried gore.

Obregon used his boot toe to turn one over, and the corpse's head almost
came off. His face was a staring silent-shrieking horror. His throat was
torn out. The other bodies were just as messily dead.

Breen said, "We can't take any chances on these bod ies being infected.
They'll all have to be staked and their heads cut off and then all
burned."

That would come later. For now, they sought strange, dangerous prey.

They came to an area . a half-dozen dead men were strewn about in a
semicircle, with their feet all pointing toward the same place, like
felled trees pointing back to a bomb-blast site.

It was a place of skulls. They were everywhere, dozens, scores, hundreds
of them, old skulls, the color of yellowed ivory, many of them cracked
and missing pieces.

They studded the powdery gray charnel ground.

They, too, were grouped in a kind of fan shape, radiating outward from
stone walls that had been partioned off between a couple of pillars,
forming a kind of three sided crib. Here was the source of the skulls.
It was heaped high with them, man-high in some spots, a warehouse of old
skulls tumbling out of the stall.

In a corner of the stall, half-hidden behind a swelling mass of skulls,
stood an upright oblong black box, its sides as shiny as black ice.

Breen grabbed Obregon's arm. "The vampire's coffin!" Obregon said,
"Empty!"

"I didn't expect to find him here. Dorian said he's buried under stones
on the other side of the pit. But the coffin is good. We'll need it when
we find him. Until then, it can stay here."

As they moved on, the path grew less straight the closer they came to
the site of the cave-in, the wreckage that blocked lanes and arcades
causing lengthy detours. The file of men grew looser, more ragged, with
groups bunching up, sometimes losing sight of the others behind blind
curves.

Flashlight beams swayed, spearing and sometimes crisscrossing as the
searchers played the lights over the scene. Eerie, to see the others'
lights vanish from sight, leaving behind curved reflections on die
vaulted arches and pillars, they in turn fading from view as the light
bearers moved farther away.

Obregon said, "If the witch spoke true, we should be nearing the place
where Baron Latos is buried."

Words echoed in the hollow, canvemous space. The vaults were the kind of
place that would have encouraged hushed talking even if the men hadn't
been looking for a monster or two.

Footsteps crunched and rocks slipped and slid underfoot as the searchers
fanned out in different directions.

At one point, Breen halted, thrusting his face in the air, sniffing,
inhaling. There's a breeze here, Major. I can feel it."

"There are some limestone caves below, and an underground stream that
flows out of the cliffs into the sea.

The caves are blocked off from the vaults. But there must be some
airholes, because the caves breathe, keeping the air in the vaults cool
and fresh."

Breen nodded, a gesture lost on Obregon, who was looking somewhere else
as they made their way around rock piles and over dirt mounds. "I get it
A kind of natural ventilation system that keeps the air circulating.

"Good thing. Without it, the dust would be so thick down here we'd need
to wear oxygen masks."

"Yes, yes," Obregon said absently, his attention elsewhere.

He'd lost sight of the men ahead and he quickened his pace to catch up
with mem.

The flooring was tricky. They had to detour around a massive splintered
pillar, Obregon peeling off to the right, where cracks in the floor,
inky rifts as wide as tree branches, and spreading like them, slowed his
advance, forcing him to step with care.

The area to the left of the pillar seemed to be less of an obstacle
course. Breen went that way, thinking to round the pillar and rejoin
Obregon on the other side. They would only be out of sight of each other
only for an instant ... Except that when Breen reached the other side,
he found that a slide had blocked off most of the archway, causing him
to have to go around the slide. Here the ground was hard and bare, his
footsteps taking on a hollow, ringing quality. "Hear that? The floor
sounds like it's hollow underneath--"

He looked around, seeing nothing of Obregon or any of the others but
their lights, dwindling behind a stone arch. "Hey! Wait for me!"

Jax Breen rounded a corner--

--and came face-to-face with the Frankenstein monster.

Headlamp and flashlight beam spotlighted the apparition.

For a flash, Jax thought that he'd come across some grotesque piece of
medieval statuary, a leering gargoyle somehow transplanted from an Old
World medieval church to New World tropics. Something that might have
appealed to Inquisition types, which saner successors had relegated to
the deepest, most forgotten vaults, as if despite its ugliness they
couldn't bring themselves to dump it in the sea and be done with it.

But it wasn't a statue, of course. It was too unnatural not to be real.

Frankenstein did, however, at the moment resemble a stonework, or
something from the mineral kingdom. That was a result of having escaped
a premature burial crushed under tons of stone and dirt, this, in turn,
a result of his furious predawn battle with Dracula, which bad, in its
fury, demolished some of the foundation's support pillars, collapsing a
mountain of debris on the unearthly foes.

From his square-topped head to the toes of his cement block-size feet,
the monster was powdered with gritty gray rock dust and graveyard mold
that made him seem a hulking stone giant

Under a cavemanlike brow were two staring golfball size orbs, blazing
with electric-blue spark-fire. His lipless month looked like it bad been
carved out from ear to ear with a butcher's knife, the whole anchored by
a blocky chin and lantern jaw.

His hands were as big as a pair of baseball gloves.

For a frozen instant, monster and man both stood motionless.

Then the monster lunged at Breen, big dead bands reaching.

They came so close that Breen could see the seams where the hands had
long ago been joined to the wrists by surgical wizardry.

Bleating with fear, a wordless cry, Breen dodged the creature's forward
rush, throwing himself to the side. He tripped, sprawling across a dirt
mound, dropping the flashlight Now the sole light was that emanating
from his hardhat headlamp, the beam of which jumped crazily in time with
Breen's frenzied movements. To an observer it would have resembled a
scene of violent action filmed with a handheld camera.

Frankenstein spun, turning on him. Breen drew the gun from the top of
his pants and fired, working the trigger, pumping slugs into the
monster's torso. Hammering blasts, deafening. Blazing muzzle flares with
each shot.

The monster jerked under the impact. His forward movement was arrested,
but he wasn't losing any ground, either. Perhaps it was an illusion of
the flashing gunfire, but Breen got the impression that the big-bore
slugs were not so much penetrating as flattening out against dense
textured musculature.

Frankenstein's layered sheaths of electron-powered muscles were
incredibly thick and tough, giving them the durability and resistance of
Kevlar or other lightweight body armor.

Breen emptied the clip into the monster. When the slugs stopped hitting
him, the monster once more started forward, and now he was really mad.

Breen scrambled backward over a rubble mound, putting it between him and
the creature.

Frankenstein clambered over the mound on all fours.

Breen was on his feet, backing away. He reached into a jacket pocket,
pulling out a grenade. He pulled the pin, arming it, counting to three,
lobbing it underhand at the monster, who was coming at him. He dove to
the side, behind a stone pillar, belly-crawling with his face in dirt.

The grenade bounced off Frankenstein, falling like a gnarly lead
pineapple at his feet.

It blew up.

Shock waves hammered the scene, bouncing Breen around. Stuff rained down
from above, tons of dirt and stone, now brought down after having
already been weakened by the earlier structural collapse.

Most of the blast's force was directed downward, into the floor. Some of
it went up, hammering the monster's form, rending him with a frontal
barrage of shrapnel.

Frankenstein howled, an earsplitting cry that duetted with the blast.

The floor, already stressed by previous damage, cracked and came apart,
splitting and collapsing. Imploding.

Caving in.

Here, the floor was a shell of rock, already weakened and cracked by
stresses. The blast caused it to crack open, collapsing, swallowing up
Frankenstein. The monster felt the bottom of the world drop out from
under his feet.

He fell through a hole in the ground into empty space, into blackness
and then swift-rushing water that swept him away.

Jax Breen was temporarily deafened by the blast and breathless, the wind
having been knocked out of him.

When he could breathe again, he sucked up lungfuls of dry, choking dust.

When the dust cleared, he was crouching behind a pillar, ready to run.
He looked back, seeing a hole in the cellarscape where the monster had
been.

The hole in the floor was sucking up masses of dirt and smoke, which
spiraled streaming into the hole and out of sight.

Moments later Obregon and his men found Breen standing near the hole,
looking down. Breen said, ' about the devil's own luck ... I" Obregon
said, "What happened?"

"I found the monster--no, he found me. I tossed a grenade at him.

"This part of the floor is over one of those limestone caves. The
floor--or cave roof, whatever you want to call it--wasn't too thick here
and it was already cracked and weakened. The blast finished the job and
blew a hole clear through it, and Frankenstein fell through it.

"Here, shine a light into there."

Someone did so, the tight flashlight beam illuminating the jagged edges
of the hole, and below that, a vista of subterranean depths, of
high-vaulted galleries and smooth slick rock, coated with a pale blue
phosphorescence.

From below came a constant rushing sound, rising from a twisty, plunging
chasm. It was caused by a swift underground torrent that raced through
it, plunging from view.

Breen said, "An underground stream. Frankenstein must have fallen into
it and been carried away. Where does that stream lead to? Does it have
an outlet?"

Obregon shrugged. "I do not know. There's a waterfall that comes out of
the cliffs, into the sea."

"Then that's where we'll find him."

"Smashed on the rocks or drowned."

"I don't know if he can drown. Or even if he breathes.

But I can tell you this. If he still lives, it'll take more than bullets
or grenades to stop him!"

Obregon laughed. "You have just barely escaped him, but already you
speak of fighting him again."

"I underestimated him. I won't make that mistake next time."

"There is work for you to do here first, my friend. Important work."

Jax Breen looked at him. Obregon said, "We may have lost
Frankenstein--for now--but we have found Dracula."

In the vaults, a gang of diggers worked on a pile of rubble, excavating
it. Despite the cave-ventilated coolness, it was hot work, and some of
the men had stripped to the waist as they labored to remove a mass of
cracked building stones. A second mound had already taken form, from the
leavings of the first.

Now the pile they'd been unearthing was revealed to have a clutching
hand sticking out from it. Not quite a human hand, with its unnaturally
long, tapered fingers, with then' curved razor-sharp three-inch nails.
Its flesh was dead white, with a nasty blue-gray tinge, like spoiled
milk.

The hand was still attached to a wrist, the arm of which was still
buried under the rocks, presumably along with the rest of its owner.

The discovery had a chilling effect. The diggers hurriedly put their
shirts back on and moved away from the mound, but they still seemed
chilled.

Not getting too close himself, Obregon said, "Is it him?

Baron Latos?"

Jax Breen rubbed his chin. "I sure hope so. I'd hate to think that there
could be more than one person with a hand like that. The only way to be
sure, though, is to finish digging him up."

"We were waiting for you."

"Now would be a good time to get that coffin."

Obregon sent a few men to fetch Dracula's coffin from the skull-filled
stall. They returned, setting it near the mound. Breen examined it,
feeling around under the quilted coffin lining, where he found a thin
layer of earth sandwiched between the lining and the coffin itself.

He said, "It's Dracula's coffin, all right"

Obregon stood beside him, peering curiously at the coffin. "What is
that, dirt?"

Breen looked up, crushing a small clod into powder between thumb and
forefinger. "That's right, dirt. The vampire must sleep by day on a bed
of soil from his native land."

"Why?"

"Damned if I know. It's one of the laws of the Un dead. Call it natural
law--no, supernatural law. All I know is, it works. When they're away
from their coffin bed of native soil, vampires don't rest easy. Weakens
their magical powers, or something."

"Then why put him back in the coffin? We want him weaker, not stronger."

"Not to worry, Major. I've got a special spell to bind Dracula, but I
need his coffin to do it."

Obregon put the diggers back to work. While not overjoyed, they
dutifully, doggedly removed the last of the stone blocks from the pile,
attacking it with long-handled spades for the close-in work.

Uncovered, the cadaver was not a pleasant sight. Limbs and torso were
stiff, rigid, as if locked in rigor mortis.

As Frankenstein had been, Dracula was coated with gritty, powdery
ash-gray dust, so that he seemed like some archaeological relic, dug up
after eons underground.

His face showed extreme emotion, a mask of ferocity and malignance. His
eyes were closed, squeezed shut.

One of the diggers kept looking at him, glancing distractedly and
interrupting his work. Another digger said, "What're you stopping for?"

"I got the feeling he was watching me."

"His eyes are closed."

"They still seem like they're watching me, following me around."

One of the workers used his entrenching tool to dig Dracula's head clear
of the dirt, and came too close, striking him in the forehead and cheek,
opening a sizable gash in a marble-white bloodless cheek.

"Look! Now he's showing his fangs!" the slacker said, near hysterical,
pointing.

It was true. Dracula's fangs were bared, the lips curled back to expose
sharp pointed teeth in a kind of snarling, supercilious sneer.

"They weren't showing before!"

"He's angry!" The work gang boss said, "All right now, don't lose your
guts." Obregon said, "You men take a break."

The diggers put down their tools and drifted off to one side, away from
the body.

Obregon studied Dracula. "He looks dead." Breen said, "Wait until
sundown. Here, let's put him in the coffin."

Breen, Obregon, the work gang boss, and another digger gathered around
the body.

Breen said, "We'll each take a limb and toss him in."

He stood bent over at Dracula's head, showing he wasn't afraid of being
that close to the vampire's fangs. With both hands, he took hold of one
of Dracula's arms by the wrist. The vampire's flesh was cold, and minus
a pulse.

Obregon took his other arm, and the two diggers each grabbed an ankle,
and together they hefted Dracula's corpse. They could barely move it.

A digger said, "Oof! He's heavy!" The other said, "With all the blood he
swilled last night ..."

Finally Dracula was unceremoniously dropped in his coffin, where he fell
with a clatter and thump, a dead weight. Obregon said, "Cover him up
with that coffin lid; that way we don't have to look at him."

They did.

Breen stood there rubbing his hands. "We'll take him topside. There's
still a few hours of daylight left. That'll help weaken him even further
and keep him from trying any tricks."

The work gang boss made a suggestion. "The rubble is thin in many
places, and it shouldn't take too long to clear a way to the pit. Then
we can use ropes to hoist it up to the castle."

Obregon gave him the go-ahead, and the diggers started in on their new
task. Dubiously eyeing the coffin, Obregon asked, "What about when it
gets dark?"

Breen said, "I know how to nail a bat to its roost"

Later, a Guard unit returned from town with a truckload of all-male
prisoners who'd been taken in the fighting at the docks. There were
about two dozen in all, including old men and boys. They'd all been
beaten, kicked, and punched, but most of them were still more or less
ambulatory.

With still more kicks and punches, they were unloaded from the
two-and-a-half-ton truck that had carried them up the coast road to
Seaguard. As they were formed up into some kind of a line in the castle
courtyard, some spoke to each other hi low voices, out of the sides of
their mouths, jailhouse-style.

"I hurt all over from where they beat me."

"Quit complaining and be glad you didn't get shot instead."

"If they didn't shoot us, it was not for mercy's sake.

You can be sure they had a good reason for sparing our lives. It may
make shooting like a blessing."

A Guard kicked the last speaker hard in the rump.

"Shut up, you, and line up with the rest of this scum," The prisoners
were mustered into a group two ranks deep. They stood as best they
could, their injuries causing some of them to list to the side.

Obregon and Jax Breen entered the scene, Obregon motioning to the
Guard-unit squad leader in charge of the prisoners, who hurried over to
his chief.

"Before you put those pigs to work, my friend here wants to see
something," Obregon indicated his companion, Breen.

Breen walked along the line of prisoners, moving from man to man,
peering into the front and rear ranks, looking for something or someone.
A glint of sunlight on metal caught his eye, and he stopped.

The eye-catching reflection had come from a crucifix worn on a chain
around the neck of an older man with close-cropped gray hair and a
lead-colored beard.

Standing face-to-face with him, Jax Breen looked the other in the eye,
then pointedly glanced down at the cross on his chest. "You believe in
that?"

Obregon started to translate, but the prisoner interrupted, speaking to
Breen in English. "Yes, I believe." Breen said, "You have faith?" The
prisoner said, "Yes, I have faith."

Breen smiled, flashing expensive capped teeth. "Splendid!

Let's hope your faith is strong."

"You will find it so, senor," the man said quietly.

"We'll see. How are you called?"

"Pedro Dos Santos."

"Come with me, Pedro Dos Santos."

The prisoner was slow in getting started, so a Guard gave him a hard
shove from behind with a palm-heel between the shoulder blades, shoving
him forward. When Dos Santos glanced back at him, the guard raised his
truncheon to strike.

Breen said quickly, "Uh-uh, I need him whole."

Obregon called out, "As you were!" and the Guard held his hand, somewhat
grudgingly lowering the baton.

Breen and Obregon turned, crossing toward the castle, trailed by Pedro
Dos Santos, who was flanked by two Guards. The group entered the
building, going into the great hall.

The jointed metal-tube framework of a reinforced hoist stood near the
edge of the pit, with a block-and-tackle arrangement of wooden wheels
and pulleys threading stout ropes that dropped straight down to the
bottom of the hole.

The hoist had been used to raise Dracula's coffin from below. The black
oblong box now stood between the hoist and the entrance into the hall.
It had been placed against a wall, under two tall windows through which
sun shafts slanted, bracketing the coffin head and foot, without
directly touching it. The light was a rich golden melon color, the
ripening light of late afternoon in the tropics.

The group stood around the coffin, facing it. Breen picked up a spade
which stood leaning against the wall and worked the tip of its blade
between die lid and the coffin.

With a sudden, savage gesture, Breen popped open the lid, flipping it up
and back so that its top hit the wall.

When Dracula was revealed, Obregon flinched ... and he knew what lay
within the coffin. Pedro Dos Santos's eyes bulged, his hand jumping to
his cross.

Breen said, with a seemingly detached air, "Isn't that the damnedest
thing you've ever seen?"

Obregon found Dracula's nearness oppressive, making him jumpy,
uncomfortable inside his own skin. The vampire seemed to shrink into
itself, flattening from die pressure of the indirect light. There were
creaking sounds.

Obregon started. "What is thatr Breen said, "Just the coffin settling."

Obregon looked at Dracula, then at Breen. "He moved!"

"He can't move, Major, not when the sun is up. That's his curse. Part of
it, anyway.

"If a direct ray of sunlight were to touch him now, he'd burn like an
ant under a magnifying glass. Wouldn't that be something to see!

"But I'm afraid that's not on the program. Like you, Major, I have my
orders. Dracula can't be properly han died here. He's got to be shipped
back to the home office.

Like toxic waste that has to go to the recycling plant to render it fit
for dumping."

Breen turned to the prisoner, who was tight-faced and wary. "You know
what mat is, Pedro?"

"Vampiw."

"That's right, Pedro, it's a vampire. The granddaddy of them all." Breen
continued, "I want you to do something for me, Pedro. A simple thing,
really, but very important. What I want you to do for me, Pedro, is take
off that cross and put it in the coffin.

"That's all. Just take the cross and put it in the coffin."

Dos Santos remained motionless, not responding.

Stone-faced.

Breen said, "Is that a no?"

Obregon said, "I could shoot him and you could take the cross from his
dead body."

Breen shook his head, an expression of wry amusement on his face. But
that's all it was, an expression. A pose.

He held up a hand, staying Obregon in his course. "No violence, Major.
That would ruin everything. It's got be voluntary if it's going to work.
He's got to want to do it himself."

Dos Santos said, "I do not give up my cross, sefior.

Not for you, or that horror in the box, or the devil himself."

"Dracula's not the devil, but he's the closest thing to His Satanic
Majesty that you'll ever see. You know who this is, Pedro? Ever heard of
the plantation in the hills where nothing grows but the walking dead?
The valley of the zombies? Eh?

"Ever heard of the Baron, the zombie master. With his three Undead
brides and his wolves and bats? Hey?

"This is him. Baron Latos, as he's called." Dos Santos said, "I believe
it. He looks evil enough."

"Believe it," Jax Breen said. "Now we come to your test of faith, Pedro.
Now we'll find out if it's truly more blessed to give than to receive.

"The vampire is quiet now, because it's day. At sundown, though, he
won't be so tame. Then he'll be in his full power and unholy glory,
raging for the blood of the living. Many innocents will die.

"But you can stop it, Pedro. Only you. Take your cross and put it in the
coffin and it will bind him there so he can't go free. Only the cross of
a true believer can hold the vampire in his coffin by night.

"Fail to act, and the innocent lives he takes tonight will be on your
soul." "And what of your soul, senor?" Dos Santos asked.

"I'm already damned, Pedro. I have no faith. The cross won't work for
me. But if your faith is genuine, as you claim, you can nail the Baron
to his coffin with the cross."

Dos Santos still seemed unconvinced. "Why not just destroy him?"

"Reasons of policy, which do not concern you."

"If I refuse?"

Breen shrugged. "We'll get somebody else, of course.

Another true believer, whose faith is stronger than yours.

A mother, a virgin. A child.

"So you see, it's all up to you. Where's your faith now? What better use
for that talisman you wear than to bind a devil?"

Dos Santos didn't bother to hide his contempt. "A pity that is not your
coffin, senor." Breen said, "I take it that's a yes."

The prisoner's tips moved, saying a silent prayer, as he took the cross
of his neck and, holding it by the chain, let the links slip through his
fingers so that cross and chain fell on top of Dracula's chest.

Obregon slammed the coffin lid closed.

From within came a deep and terrible groan.

Breen's hand was cupped around a long glittering object that he'd palmed
earlier, the daggerlike letter opener he'd lifted from the hotel's front
desk. Coming up behind Dos Santos while he stood staring at the coffin,
Breen stabbed him in the back, a short savage thrust into the small of
the other's back, severing the spinal cord and trunk nerve tines,
bringing instant death.

Obregon looked curiously at Dos Santos's body sprawled on the floor, at
the foot of the coffin. ' filth means nothing to me, of course, but
still I wonder, why kill him now?"

Breen used a pocket hankie to wipe the murder weapon clean. He said
seriously, "I didn't want to take a chance on his maybe losing faith.
This way he died a martyr, when his faith was at its strongest His
sacrifice will have great power to bind Dracula."

"It will hold him in his coffin at night?"

"Yes, all night. By tomorrow, he'll be flying away on a plane out of
here, and you won't have to worry about him anymore."

"With him gone, who's going to control the zombies?"

"There aren't going to be any more. Your men will round up the last of
the current crop and get rid of them by burning them, and that'll be die
end of it. No more zombies, not here, anyway, not when the world is
taking an interest in Isla Morgana.

"After all the troubles recently, the world news media are going to come
here and stick their noses in. When they do, they're going to find
nothing but a nice quiet little island recovering from riots caused by
certain unnamed political agitators. After they've covered the story for
a while, they'll get tired of it and run away as soon as the next big
story comes along."

Obregon indicated the dead martyr. "What'll we do with him?"

"Get rid of the body, along with all the others. We don't need Pedro,
just his faith and sacrifice. It's not so easy these days to find a true
believer!"

Obregon called for some men to take away the corpse.

He posted a guard by Dracula's coffin and then posted another guard to
watch the first.

He and Jax Breen went outside, in the sun. Obregon lit up a cigarette,
greedily inhaling half of it in one puff, then at a more leisurely pace
exhaling twin streams of smoke through his nostrils.

Breen said, "It's been a helluva night and day, but I'm finally starting
to get the feeling that things are getting back under control."

That's when an excited-seeming messenger dashed up to tell them that the
Frankenstein monster was rampaging in the town, making his way toward
the castle.

Sizzling shards of white-hot shrapnel from the grenade's blast had
ripped into Frankenstein at supersonic speeds, searing him to the bone,
stunning him. Then he fell through a hole in the ground.

He plummeted into darkness, bouncing off overhanging rock ledges and
spurs, blows that would have pulped normal human flesh and shattered
bones. But there was nothing normal about the monster and little that
was human, despite his man-shaped form and his dim origin as the
pieced-together parts of various dead men.

But the cosmic rays extracted from the lightning mat provided his
creator, Henry Frankenstein, with the literal spark of life had
permeated his every cell, transmuting him into something transhuman, a
near immortal, perhaps indestructible.

He fell a long hard way, plunging at last into a swift moving current, a
torrent that plunged through narrow tunnel passages with blinding speed.

Frankenstein was in liquid streaming darkness, sucked along by the
current, helpless as a rag doll, buffeted, pin wheeling, flung this way
and that. At high speed he was smashed into projections thrusting up
from the tunnel's surface.

The water completely filled the tunnel, leaving nowhere to breathe.
Frankenstein's gaping maw and nostrils sucked in water, creating
agonizing fiery pressure in his sinuses and lungs.

Not that breathing was too immediately important, not for him. He could
do without oxygen for quite some time.

If he went without it for too long, his whole system shut down, putting
him in a state of suspended animation, his life processes stilled to a
low, pulsing ebb. He could lie still as death for years at a time,
decades, but when he was once again exposed to open air, the metabolic
fires would begin to burn brighter and hotter, ultimately rousing him
from his trance.

As he was whipped around by the underground river, there was a final
increase of riotous speed, a rushing plunge toward a lightening, as the
black current suddenly flowered into a pale wavery yellow-green disk
that grew and grew until suddenly it became a portal and the monster was
flying feetfirst through it.

He burst out of water into midair, arcing downward as the underground
stream reached its exit and spewed out as a waterfall from a hole in the
cliff face high above the sea and crashing surf.

He fell a hundred feet or so, knifing downward into the waters of the
bay.

The water was deep here and he plunged far below the surface, from
blue-green depths into cool layers of deep blue, then still deeper into
engulfing blue-black coldness.

Streams of silver bubbles from his nose and mouth climbed up and up,
rising into the dim distant heights where sunlight still touched the
seawater.

Images whirled in the monster's disordered mad mind, a nightmare
universe of distorted shapes and savage life that crawled and swam and
slithered and flew, and worst of all, walked upright on two legs and
called itself Homo sapiens, "man who understands."

Frankenstein understood that all humankind was his deadly enemy.

Now the recent past streamed through his head, mixing in a kaleidoscopic
whirl, a cyclonic brainstorm. In this, his most recent incarnation,
black magic and human sacrifice and an electrical storm had fired him
with the relentless power of evil housed in superhuman flesh.

As if possessed by a demonic spirit of vengeance, Frankenstein was
impelled by one iron law, to seek revenge on Dracula for having forced
him into decades of brutal enslavement, ultimately betraying him to an
agonizing death.

History had proven time and again mat death was not final for the
monster, and this latest episode was no exception.

The goal of Dracula's destruction had guided Frankenstein down from the
valley of the zombies to the coast and Seaguard Castle, where Dracula
had hidden a coffin in what he thought was a safe retreat in the vaults.

But Frankenstein had found him there, even though he'd had to rout the
castle's defenders to do k, which was easy, since he could shrug off
their bullets while they couldn't shrug off their broken necks and
snapped spines and dismembered-while-still-living bodies.

Dracula was strong, too, stronger man he'd been for the last half
century. Frankenstein had welcomed this, craving the long-awaited bliss
of tearing into the vampire lord with his bare hands.

The titanic battle in the vaults had brought on a catastrophic
structural collapse, burying Frankenstein and Dracula under tons of
collapsed rubble.

Outside, the sun had just broken above the horizon, so once Dracula was
buried under the wreckage, he went inert, into his dormant day cycle.

Frankenstein was not dormant, but was pinned beneath huge stone blocks
and massive broken timbers and tons of dirt. He'd still been trapped
there when Dorian had sent her mediumistic mind probe questing among the
vaults.

It had taken him hours to dig his way out from under the pile. To do it,
he'd had to burrow deep into the powdery gray earth that lined the sub
vault floor.

He'd been stumbling around in the dimness when he'd heard the sound of
approaching intruders. The nagging buzz of their insectlike voices
created in him an instant urge to crush them out, smearing them against
the stones.

After which he would resume his search for Dracula and destroy him.

He wanted to get at the newcomers, but the vaults, with their
checkerboard of partitioned areas, walled-off sections, and open
arcades, along with the damage wrought by the collapsed floors, were a
confusing maze that hindered nun from closing with these intrusive
pygmies.

Then he'd stumbled around a corner, drawn by flitting indirect light
beams, and come head-on with lax Breen, practically bumping into him.
The bullets fired into him hadn't tickled but they hadn't done much
damage, either.

He had a tough hide and even tougher musculature that was well-nigh
bulletproof.

But the grenade had hurt. So had the wild flume ride through black
sunless tunnels and being flung out of the cliffside on a waterfall,
dropping more than a hundred feet straight down into the water ...
Already he was recovering. He breathed water in and out. Now that his
lungs and nostrils were full of it, it didn't really hurt anymore. That
was only in the beginning, in the, transition from air to water ...
There was air in the water, lots of it. And the monster could breathe
it. As he forced the water in and out of his lungs, he was able to
extract enough oxygen to fire his metabolic furnaces.

He rose, hauling himself up in an ungainly but effective working of his
massive limbs, making real progress.

As he climbed, the cold pressing darkness ebbed, lessening.

Sea-shades lightened, going from inky black to blue black, then to royal
blue, blue, turquoise, blue green.

He was not alone. There was plenty of sea life on all sides. This was
Seaguard's burial ground. When a prisoner died, he went over the side of
the wall, off the cliff, and into the sea. It happened often enough that
there was always a fair number of sharks prowling the area. Between the
bodies and the nearby cannery wastes that were also dumped into the
waters, there were plenty of sharks in the bay.

This day had been a real bonanza, with an abundance of bodies tossed
into the sea, which now seethed with sharks. The water was boiling with
them, sleek streamlined ominous gray shapes^ gliding, darting, whirling,
ceaselessly prowling.

A big wide-mawed brute made a tentative pass at Frankenstein, not quite
ready to put the bite on him, but working up to it. It came so close to
him that it brushed against his side. The shark's sandpaper-rough,
coarsegrained hide would have scraped a normal human's skin raw, but it
didn't make a dent in the monster's.

The shark turned, making another pass. The monster reached to push him
away. Quicker than he'd thought, much quicker, the shark reacted,
rolling on its side and clamping its multifanged mouth on one of the
monster's arms.

The impact was jarring, wrenching Frankenstein this way and that, as the
shark rolled in an attempt to worry and tear off the limb. The monster
dove, carrying the monster with it, down deeper.

Other sharks glided in, interested, senses tingling from the turbulence
in the water that told of a death struggle, no doubt soon to be followed
by tantalizing bloodlettings and tasty chunks of flesh.

Which is what happened. Not to Frankenstein, though.

To the shark.

Frankenstein was riding a live torpedo now, wrapping his free arm in a
stranglehold around the front of the shark's body. He fought to pull his
other arm free from the shark's maw but its rows of formidably arrayed
fangs clutched him vise-tight.

The shark was like one huge muscle, strong, supple, and savage. On the
other hand, its grinding choppers were making little headway against the
monster's flesh, which was far tougher even than shark hide.

Frankenstein put a horny-nailed thumb in one of the shark's eyes,
popping it. The shark went wild with pain and fear, now wanting to get
away, but still reflexively continuing to chomp at the monster's arm
gripped between its jaws.

Frankenstein got a hand on the shark's snout and started prying its jaws
open, tearing them. His arm was freed, trailing scraps of flesh and
streaks of the acid-green corrosive ichor that ran like supercharged
blood through his veins.

With a final frantic squirming and wriggling, the shark managed to throw
off Frankenstein, propelling him far away through the water.

The stuff streaming from his chewed and mangled arm initially attracted
the sharks, but when a mass of them nosed in to investigate, even the
highly diluted amount of the acidic, ichor that reached their senses
through volumes of filtering seawater was offensive to them, causing
them to arrow away from him.

The shark that had attacked Frankenstein was bleeding from one ruined
eye and at the place where its jaws had been popped, and that was real
blood, fresh and sweet.

A couple of dozen swirling sharks converged on their injured fellow and
began making runs at it, ripping into it with their teeth and trying to
bite off a hunk. The more they attacked and the more blood was spilled,
the madder and more frantic became their efforts, until at last all that
remained of the victim were mere shreds, which were snapped up by the
smaller pilot fish that swam. in the wake of the sharks, seeking just
such tasty morsels.

Meanwhile Frankenstein swam away underwater, splashing landward with
wide flailing strokes of his limbs, like some giant ungainly sea turtle.

Carried inshore by the rising tide, he was swept into the harbor, toward
the riot-torn docks.

The waters here were roiled, disturbed, filled with de bris from piers
and warehouses that had burned by rioters, and slicked with machine oils
from cranes and forklifts and such that had been dumped into the sea.

The fuel spills were foul, nasty when he inhaled them along with the
water. Frankenstein struck for the surface, his massive square-topped
head breaking above the waves.

It was agonizing, making the transition from breathing water to once
more breathing ah*.

Coughing and choking, spewing water from mouth and nostrils, the monster
shuddered and sputtered with racking pain. Blindly, he raged with loud
groans and cries, which carried a fair distance across the water.

His outcry attracted the attention of a motorboat cruising offshore, a
Guardia police launch with a three-man crew, which changed course,
making for him.

The Guards hadn't seen him drop from the cliff waterfall into the sea.
They were patrolling farther inshore, cruising parallel to the
waterfront, a couple of hundred yards from land. Their primary task was
to intercept anybody trying to flee the island by boat. Such fugitives
were liable to have money or other valuable goods, which would be
confiscated to swell Guardia coffers. These Guards also acted as
spotters, reporting any new trouble spots breaking out on die wharves.

The launch closed on Frankenstein, bobbing amid the waves. Reflected
sunlight and smoke on the water kept the boatmen from making him out too
clearly.

The boat's motors putt-putted, the pilot cutting back on the throttle,
letting the low-slung patrol craft glide in toward the castaway. It
pulled up alongside him, splashing around on the boat's portside. The
stem engines thrummed, idling. She was a sweet little craft.

One of the three-man crew stood at the rail, holding a boat hook,
leaning out over the water in order to toss it to the swimmer.

Then he got a better look at the floater he intended to haul out from
the sea.

Frankenstein's head gleamed and glistened like a chunk of volcanic rock,
the hair having been burned off by the revivifying lightning bolts of
last night's electrical storm, during his voodoo-powered reanimation.

The boatman said, "My God! The poor devil's been burned to a crisp, but
he's still alive!"

Then he got a better look at Frankenstein and saw that poor devil though
he might be, he certainly wasn't human.

The Guard started hollering excitedly, garbling his words so, the others
couldn't make out what he was saying. He used the boat hook as a spear,
jabbing it at Frankenstein.

It jabbed him in the face, not increasing any pleasant humor. Snarling,
the monster got a good grip around the rod with one hand, immobilizing
it while the crewman struggled in vain to work it free.

He said, "Let go, you damned thing!"

Frankenstein tore the pole from the Guard's hands and threw it away,
scaling it far across the waters. The Guard fell back into the boat, out
of sight. Frankenstein reached up, getting his oversized strangler's
hands on the gunwale, which dipped seaward, heeling to portside as the
monster put his weight on it and hauled himself dripping out of the
water and into the boat His would-be rescuer had tumbled into the
opposite side of the boat, back braced against the starboard stem
corner. Forward, in a two-seat cockpit was the boat pilot, hands on the
wheel under the curved windshield, and a second man, who was rising out
of his seat, shouting, drawing a big-bore, heavy-caliber revolver.

The pistolero fired at the monster. Frankenstein yowled, swatting at the
air as the slugs tore into him. Not too far into him. They smashed holes
a couple of inches deep, then flattened against his incredibly tough
layered musculature.

Frankenstein pawed the air, starting toward his assailant.

The man in the stern seized a spearfishing gun and fired a barbed bolt
into the monster's chest. Quivering with rage, Frankenstein seized the
shaft from where it protruded from his chest and pulled it clear,
throwing it aside.

The man in the stern jumped overboard.

That stymied Frankenstein. He had no desire to go back in the water.

The man forward, the shooter, was at it again, discarding the empty
handgun, clawing for a shark-killing shotgun in a waterproof scabbard
wedged in the seat beside him.

Frankenstein rushed him clumsily, slipping on the deck and crashing into
him, getting his hands on him, brushing the shotgun aside.

The other jerked the trigger by mistake, accidentally triggering a blast
that blew off the boat pilot's head.

The corpse fell forward across the controls, somehow tripping the
throttle, powering up the engines with a rush.

The boat lurched forward, bulleting across the waves, the hull bottom
slapping their tops.

The bow was pointed toward shore and the boat followed, plowing a
straight sea furrow toward the fast approaching curve of the inner
harbor.

The shotgun clattered on deck as Frankenstein grabbed the shooter and
crunched him together like an accordion, putting one hand on top of the
man's head and shoving down, collapsing the neck vertebrae, shoving his
chin into his collarbone, his lungs and rib cage collapsing, heart
exploding.

Frankenstein was still taking him apart when the boat plowed headfirst
into a rocky stretch of the coast.

The impact threw Frankenstein out of the boat, catapulting him over the
rocks and onto the beach, where he rolled and tumbled.

The boat folded in on itself, exploding in a streaming fireball as fuel
tanks burst and ignited, spewing shrapnel, flaming gasoline, and masses
of thick black smoke over rocks and shore.

Fiery patches of blazing gas burned on the gritty sand beach, sending up
columns of black smoke like smudge pots.

People came running to see what had happened.

Frankenstein, stunned, crouched on hands and knees.

He was near enough to the blazing gasoline and oil patches to feel the
heat Fires crackled, the smoke thick and choking.

Lightning was life-bringing, but fire was a menace. It had hurt him in
the past and continued to hold the power to destroy him.

Frankenstein struggled to his feet, starting across the beach. This was
no pleasure beach for swimming and sunbathing, it was a sandy ribbed
strand studded with rocks and reefs, littered with empty bottles, used
condoms, trash.

Inland, at the far side of the sandy strip, an eight-foot high retaining
wall rose to the roadway and street level, where it was edged by a
walkway with a metal guardrail.

People rushed to it, massing along the rail to see the boat crash.
Nearer to them and more alarming was Frankenstein.

Dazed, he lumbered forward, bent forward almost double.

Spectators cried out excitedly.

"Look! The crash must have done that to him, the poor man!"

"See his head, his scalp! How can anyone take that kind of punishment
and keep on going?"

"Lord, he's a big one!"

"Must be why he's still moving! That would have killed an ordinary man."

"He's no man, he's a giant!"

"Giant? Why, he--he's a monster!"

Nearing the wall, Frankenstein lifted his head, looking up. When he saw
the people all lined up along the rail, gaping at him, his stupor was
burned away by instant and total rage.

Now that they had a good look at him, the gawkers weren't just staring
anymore, they were reacting, some with shouts and shrieks.

When he rushed the wall, reaching up to grab at their feet, they
scattered screaming.

Frankenstein turned his face to the cape north of the harbor, to the
cliffside heights where Seaguard Castle sat.

Where Dracula awaited.

With deliberate, relentless tread, Frankenstein stalked toward it.

Zombies are easy to burn, generally speaking, especially if they've been
dead for a few months and have had time to dry out. Then they go up like
kindling. Such was the fate of the zombies now roaming the hills, in the
vicinity of the old plantation manor house and sugar mill, where zombie
master Dracula had until recently held sway.

Now, while there was still daylight, two Guard squads and auxiliary
thugs cleaned up the old plantation ... While he who had once been a man
called Soto, watched.

He was still Soto, in name at least. But was he still a man?

Yes. A dead man. Walking dead man.

He was a zombie, too. But not like the other zombies, who were now
getting theirs courtesy of Guardia cremators.

They were mindless cattle. They'd been made by the zombie master,
Dracula. When circumstances had temporarily broken that control, they'd
been freed for the first time since death to act on their own, rather
than in lock step mindless obedience to the one who'd made them.

Freed, they had but one thought, to avenge themselves on those who'd
sold them to be zombies, usually after having first done away with them.

Their vengeance was frightful and their recent invasion of Magdalena had
been one of the causes of the fear-maddened riots that had seriously
weakened the formidable apparatus of terror that Isla Morgana's masters
used to cow the population into slavish obedience.

Not even the . tortures of Seaguard and the ruthless secret-police
Guards could keep the downtrodden penned in their hovels when zombies
stalked by day and monsters went abroad day and night.

The evil wizards and occultists and modern-day sorcerers who'd plied the
craft of black magic here had been among the first to die. Such a one,
and the greatest of them all, was Basil Lodge, a satanic sorcerer who'd
been the most powerful magician on the island, perhaps even more darkly
gifted than Dracula. With this difference-- that Lodge practiced black
magic, but Dracula was black magic.

Lodge claimed to be the patron and protector of his "niece," Dorian. He
was the operator, she was the medium, naturally gifted, percipient,
receptive as a tuning fork or seismograph needle to the vibrations of
the invisible world.

It was Lodge who, using voodoo, necromancy, and human sacrifice, had
reanimated Frankenstein, electrifying him with the devilish power of
sorcery and rendering him more powerful and dangerous than ever.

A weird and terrible ceremony, one that had been held in the old
sugarcane mill on the property, involved the burning alive of a real
witch and the removal of the still beating heart from her hermaphrodite
offspring, said heart being fed to the monster. Soto had seen it all, a
hoodlum and killer caught up in the unknown. He'd been down here with
some associates, scouting the possibilities of setting up drug
smuggling, vice, and money-laundering operations with the compliant,
greedy government fronted by Sir Hugo Stafford.

Greed and a strange lust for Dorian had lured him into a dark world of
magic and monsters. While Uncle Basil had invoked evil elementals to
reanimate the Frankenstein monster in the old mill, Soto had been hiding
outside, watching through a window. So transfixed had he been by the
awesome spectacle that he'd been caught napping by a treacherous
accomplice, who'd shot him in the back, killing him. Oddly, the killer
was no supernatural being either, just another gangster and murderer
like Soto, a lucky backshooter.

Only it was Soto who'd gotten lucky, if you could call being brought
back from the dead lucky. He'd been called back, his awareness anchored
to his fresh-killed corpse, a side effect of the tremendous sorcerous
energies that had been conjured up by Uncle Basil in his successful
attempt to revive the monster.

In reanimating Frankenstein, he'd also inadvertently reanimated Soto,
making him one of the walking dead, a zombie.

Zombie with a difference.

Basil Lodge had proved to be a mighty wizard but a poor planner. He
hadn't been able to control what he'd called up, and he became a victim
of his own creation, ripped screaming limb from limb by the monster.

Frankenstein had then gone crashing off through the jungle night,
trudging inexorably down through the hills, out the mountain valley
pass, and along the coast highway to Seaguard, in search of Dracula.

Leaving Soto all alone. Soto was a masterless zombie.

He had free will. But what good was that to a dead man?

Night turned into day as he wandered the plantation, thinking. His
thoughts were untainted by emotion. That part of him was really dead. He
didn't need to breathe, he had no heartbeat, but he could walk and talk.

Soto wasn't so sure about how he liked the idea of being a zombie, even
a masterless one, but he supposed it was better than being dead,
especially when he thought of the look on the face of the guy who'd
killed him when he'd seen Soto come back to kill him.

In the afternoon, the Guards came. They drove up in two SUVs, vehicles
bumping and rolling across the vast bare dirt front yard spreading out
from the old manor house.

They had guns but didn't need them. They roamed the property, netting
zombies, throwing gasoline on them, and setting them on fire. The
zombies were unresistant, near catatonic. They were the ones who'd
stayed behind, bound to the plantation that had seen them rise from the
the dead. These were the oldest and most derelict zombies, with long
stringy hair as combustible as dried straw, mummy faces, and grayish
withered flanks and shanks.

They burned like cordwood and having been consumed rose up no more.

The Guard cremators came to the old mill, marveling at the prodigies of
destruction that bad been unleashed there, with dismembered bodies
strewn all about, human wreckage created by Frankenstein in his first
orgy of bloodletting destruction after being resurrected by black magic.
The cleanup squad could only douse the remnants with gas and torch them.

Soto kept clear of the purifiers, hiding in the brush, watching.

The Guards had first picked off the zombies to leave a clear playing
field for what came next. More dangerous by far than zombies were
Dracula's kind, the Un dead. Vampires. They were an ever-contagious
plague, not to be left unchecked.

The manor house was now a charnel house, filled with recently dead
bodies, more victims of the doomed attempt to plunder Dracula's
treasure, a fabulous gold hoard that now sat on the bottom of a deep
harbor channel, with Guardia leader Major Quantez, who'd hoped to carry
it away by sea, now chained to it, forty fathoms deep.

Men went into the house, carrying out bodies. These were the victims,
but all the same they had to be staked, beheaded, and burned. And they
were. The Guard cremators working the pyres wore gas masks and used ten
foot-long poles to stir up the flames. So much for the merely dead. The
precautions had been taken just in case they'd been contaminated by the
bite of the vampire, to rise again.

The hiding place of Dracula's three vampire brides was found, their
sealed coffins dragged outside the house, into the sun. When the lids
were opened, the vampire brides began to smoke and sizzle hi the rays of
afternoon sunlight. Burning, they twitched and spasmed, hair blazing up
and dead flesh sizzling on the bone.

The coffins smoldered, catching fire. The vampire brides were a long
time dying. The Guards were in a hurry, so at last they staked the
smoking corpses and cut off their heads.

Behind the back of the derelict manse lay a century old graveyard and a
stone chapel and crypt. The latter two yielded some more bodies, which
were methodically destroyed. There were no fresh graves in the graveyard
and too many old graves to dig up and check, so the purifiers ignored
them.

They splashed gas in the house and on the veranda and the front and
torched it. When the fire was good and hot and high, they got back into
their vehicles and drove back to town, leaving Soto alone.

The rest of the afternoon wore on. The manor house blazed up, fell in on
itself, burned some more, then burned itself out, a smoldering pile of
half-charred beams, planks, and ashes.

As shadows lengthened, Soto became restless. This restlessness was a
unique phenomenon, since he'd experienced nothing like it since being
killed and coming back dead-alive.

At dusk, the restlessness quickened into what he now recognized as a
pull. An invisible force tugged at his limbs and his awareness. When he
attempted to wrench away from it, it was difficult to move, so that he
felt like he was wading through a gluey and resistant clinging force.

When he moved toward it, the pressure lessened and his movements were
free and easy, almost effortless.

By circling and moving about, he soon located the center of this force.
It came from the northeast, from the city of Magdalena on the harbor.

He set his footsteps toward it and followed them down from the hills to
the coast highway, toward town.

Dracula was bound to his coffin by the martyr Dos San tos's cross, even
by night. As an added precaution, a length of antique black iron chain
that had once been used in the slave trade had been wrapped around his
coffin.

And it was night. After sundown, there had been movement inside the
coffin, clawing and scratching sounds, creaks and groans. That was
Dracula squirming around inside, trying to avoid contact with the sacred
cross that pinned him to the spot. Considering the vampire lord's
violent physical aversion to sacred icons and holy symbols, his
now-captive position was not an enviable one.

The sun had set. By rights, he should have already risen from his coffin
and gone on the prowl for hot fresh blood in the veins of the living.
Instead, the holy object kept him stuck in his coffin like a butterfly
pinned to a mounting board.

Worse, these idiots in whose captivity he now languished were cooking up
some mad scheme in which he, all unwillingly, was to play a key role.

All he could do for now was squirm and seethe in coffin cofmement.

Hie coffin had been moved outside, into the open, outside the castle
walls. Beyond the north gate, in a sandy patch of yard that served as
the motor pool, where the vehicles were kept.

Here the ground was flat and offered clear sightlines and no brush to
obscure a view of the road climbing up from the town and the harbor.
Grouped to one side of the field were flat-roofed barnlike metal
structures with corrugated tin walls, tool and repair sheds, and
garages.

The coffin was set down at the far end of the field, opposite the north
gate. There was plenty of light. Annexed to one of the repair sheds was
a generator shack, which was used to power searchlights and floodlights
set up around the field. Some Jeeps and SUVs grouped in a semicircle
with their headlights on added to the brightness.

It could be seen that in the area in front of the coffin lay a broad
oval patch of dirt that was picked even cleaner and barer than the
surrounding ground, where at least some weeds flourished.

One of the repair sheds had been converted into a kind of communications
and command area. Jax Breen went into it. Off to one side, near a
screened window, Dorian Winter sat on a crate. She'd been handcuffed to
a disassembled engine block that must have weighed several hundred
pounds.

Julie Evans sat nearby, smooth-faced, relaxed. She said, "You never know
with sensitives, Jax. She might be able to hypno some mouth-breathing
guard and convince him to set her free. But she can't hypno her way past
a pair of steel handcuffs and a quarter-ton truck engine block." He
said, "She could always chew her arm off at the wrist, the way animals
do when they're stuck in a leg trap."

Dorian said, "That's more your style, Breen. Besides, I'm not a
hypnotist, I'm a medium."

"Uncle Basil was the hypno. Did he have you under his control?"

"No," she answered sarcastically. "That might have given him an unfair
advantage, and we all know he was too much of a gentleman to do that!"
Breen asked, "What was his deal with Dracula?" Dorian said, "He found
the island a convenient place to pursue his research in the occult
sciences. In return, he helped Dracula with his zombies and voodoo
cult."

Breen smirked. "Yes, I'm sure it was a very friendly environment, a
tropical paradise complete with vampires, zombies, witch doctors, human
sacrifices, and the like, protected by a corrupt secret police force
ruling through violence and intimidation." "Uncle Basil found it very
congenial," Dorian said dryly.

Breen turned and faced her, starting to drill her. "Why has the
Frankenstein monster turned on his master, Dracula?"

"Not his master anymore, Breen, or hadn't you noticed?"

Dorian purred. "I don't know why, but I can guess.

When Uncle Basil resurrected the monster, he called on very old and
primal demons of blood, hate, and storm.

Some of their unquiet spirits may have gotten into the monster.

"Or perhaps it's something as simple as a zombie's revenge.

When a zombie is freed from control, it has an irresistible urge to
revenge itself on die one who made it what it is. Frankenstein was a
kind of zombie, under Dracula's control.

"Frankenstein was destroyed, or nearly so, ending the vampire's
domination. But Frankenstein can't be destroyed, it seems, at least not
yet. Uncle Basil revived him with black magic, but in the end his
sorcery was too weak to keep the monster from destroying him."

"Could Dracula regain control over Frankenstein?"

"I doubt it. Not now. The spirit of vengeance that animates Frankenstein
is awesome."

Breen thought it over for a minute. "Interesting. Now, how much of it is
true?"

Dorian raised her cuffed hand, rattling the chain links against the
metal flange to which she'd been cuffed. "I'm not going anywhere. It's
my neck, too, if you can't contain the monsters." Breen, unmoved, said,
"It's your neck literally, if Dracula gets out. He'd sniff out a
sensitive like a hog rooting for truffles."

He got ready to leave. "Here's some advice. Don't try any of your mind
games on Julie. She's got orders to take extreme measures if you do. And
she will."

"I'm sure," Dorian said, glancing at Julie, who smiled at her.

Breen nodded to Julie, who followed him outside. He said, "Watch her,
she's tricky."

Julie stifled a yawn with the back of her hand, though her eyes were
alert

"She's nothing. It's a waste of time, me guarding her." "No, I want you
to do it," he said determinedly. "Don't underestimate Dorian. She's got
a wild talent, even if she can't fully control it herself. Uncle Basil
was an adept He knew stuff, heavy stuff, and there's no telling what she
might have picked up along the way."

Julie scoffed, unimpressed. "She's not that good. She's weak, unfocused.
Some natural ability, but no real skill."

"She's a witch. A real one, not a cartoon version. She's an unknown, and
I don't want her upsetting my plans."

Breen fretted. "Another thing. As a sensitive, she's particularly
vulnerable to Dracula's influence, particularly at night."

Julie raised her eyes heavenward. "Ye gods! If you're that worried about
her, Jax, I'll neutralize her."

"Don't be so bloody-minded! We need her. As the only living witness to
what's been going on in this island, she's an invaluable resource.
They'll want her for close questioning back at the citadel."

"Yes, dear."

"Don't humor me, dammit!"

Her smile faded, her face hardening. "All right. I've internalized your
concern. Happy now?"

Before he could answer, Obregon came hurrying over, excited.
"Frankenstein is coming!"

Breen said, "You're the auxiliary backup system, Julie.

If the main plan fails, kill Dracula."

She sneered, "Sure, just like that." "Just like that," he said
seriously. "The cross will keep him immobile in his coffin. Drive a
stake through his heart and cut off his head. If you're quick enough and
strike before he looks you in the eye, you might make it."

"How very encouraging!"

"It's the only chance you'll get If Frankenstein gets to him first, the
cross will be lost and Dracula will be freed from his coffin.
Frankenstein will never get him then. Dracula will just turn into a bat
and fly away, to retaliate later, at his own time and place."

While Jax Breen was talking to Julie Evans, Obregon fidgeted, dancing in
place in his eagerness to get moving.

Breen finished and turned, starting to move away.

Obregon lunged forward, and the two were off, hurrying toward a rise
overlooking the coast road. They scanned the empty ribbon of road rising
from the harbor town.

Obregon said, "No monster yet." "Never mind the monster," Breen said.
"Where's Kearny with that truck? The whole plan depends on him getting
here in tune. He should have been here a long time ago."

"The boatyard is down at the docks, where there was much rioting."
Obregon said, feelingly, "Curse that Frankenstein! Just when our troops
were restoring order in the town, that damnable brute had to take a
stroll on the beach and get everything all stirred up again! The only
good part was that the monster scared the rioters back to their shacks.
Now they're all locked up tight inside their homes. I wish I was with
them!"

Some sharp-eyed spotter saw the truck and gave the signal.

A minute later, and all those standing on the rise could see it, a
two-and-a-half-ton truck came barreling up the switchback, headlights
sweeping through hairpin curves.

A rolling line of dust trailed the vehicle up the hillside.

Up top they could hear the motor winding out, the vehicle rocking on its
suspension, occasionally bottoming out on the steep, twisty climb.

Obregon, frowning, said, "He drives fast, your friend Kearny." Breen
said, "He's in a hurry, all right. And he's not my friend. He works for
me."

The truck neared the summit. Movement could now be seen in the hopper,
where figures scrambled and struggled.

One figure clung to the outside of one of the side rails, in danger of
falling off the high-speed machine.

Shots crackled, lines of light fired by those crawling around on the
back of the truck.

Obregon and Breen looked at each other. Obregon said, "What are they
shooting at?" Breen said, "They're shooting at each other."

"What! Are they mad?"

The shots electrified the Guards. Noncoms ran around shouting orders.
Others just ran around shouting. There was a lot of running back and
forth over the same ground to no real purpose.

The truck crested the hill, going so fast over the humped ridge that all
four wheels left the ground. The truck set down with a jolt,
fishtailing, threatening for an instant to overturn before righting.

It careened across the flat hilltop, weaving dangerously.

A figure was thrown from the back of the truck, hitting the ground, not
getting up.

The truck driver leaned on the horn, honking, blatting.

The Guard troops were more focused now. Weapons were unslung, bolt
actions worked, fire selections made, safeties thrown.

The truck slowed, as if unsure, searching for something.

It drove past the west main gate, swinging wide around the northwest
corner of the wall, to the north field, where, bathed in floodlights,
Dracula's coffin awaited.

Obregon shouted, "Hold your fire until I give the word, men!"

The truck rolled past Obregon and Breen. In the cab, Kearny was driving.
The windshield was smashed, the driver's-side door had been torn off,
and a battered corpse hung half in, half out of the passenger-side
window.

The back of the truck was stacked high with rows of fifty-gallon drums,
partially covered with a canvas tarp.

A heavy chemical smell clung to the containers.

So did Frankenstein. The monster was in the back of the truck, stalking
a couple of Guards there who were shooting at it. The shots did little
damage, but at least irked and distracted the monster enough to keep it
from making a successful effort to get rid of them and the driver.

Kearny whipped the steering wheel back and forth, at the same time
alternately braking and speeding up, in an attempt to keep Frankenstein
off balance. Kearny kept sticking his head out the side of the cab,
where the door used to be, craning forward and backward, both to see
what lay ahead beyond his frosted windshield, and to see how close to
him the monster was.

Kearny's Panama hat was jammed on his head, the front brim pushed up
against the crown, cavalry-style.

Stress had him grinning maniacally, showing yellow horse teeth.

Breen shouted, "Kearny! That madman! He's given a ride to the monster!"

Some Guards started shooting at the truck. Breen said, "Make them stop!
If the truck crashes, we're sunk!"

Obregon shot his pistol into the air to get their attention, a tough
sell when he was competing with a runaway truck complete with monster
speeding toward them.

Its headlights swept across Dracula's coffin and suddenly Kearny jammed
on the brakes. The sudden lurch flung one man from the back of the
truck. Heavy drums clonked against each other, slamming against the
panel at the back of the cab. From the sound of liquid sloshings coming
the barrels, it seemed that they were all filled to the brim. Their
chemical reek was heavy, industrial strength.

Brakes locked and the truck tires dug furrows in the field, the machine
shuddering to a halt about twenty feet in front of the coffin, the
engine stalling.

Before the truck had come to a complete stop, Keamy jumped out. He ran
with one hand on top of his head, holding down his hat, making for
Breen, now moving toward the coffin's vicinity.

Jax Breen said, "You were only supposed to bring the chemicals, not
Frankenstein!" Keamy said, "He's a party crasher! He was climbing along
the side of the road when we came driving by.

Didn't see him until it was too late. He jumped on board. I didn't see
it, but I could feel it. The weight of the truck shifted.

"Some of the boys were riding in the hopper, in case we ran into any
rioters or robbers. We didn't expect to run into the monster! They
started shooting, but it didn't do any good.

"So I figured I'd take my chances and try to make it, and hope that you
were ready--say! Where're you going?"

Breen was running into a tin repair shed, near the coffin.

Obregon grabbed Kearny by the arm, steering him to the side, out of the
way of the Guards who were rapidly approaching with guns. They
shouldered their arms, firing at Frankenstein, streaming lead at him.

He was reeling drunkenly, with eye-rolling, limb swinging mania. Some
riflemen grouped behind the cof fin, firing at the monster. Gunfire
raked him, knocking him down. The shooters poured more lead at him,
tearing up the ground around him.

Frankenstein flailed around, pawing the earth. The gunfire was like a
streaming fire hose, knocking him off his feet each time he seemed to
have regained his footing. It might as well have been a stream of water
for all the damage it did to him.

Finally, like a man braving a gale-force wind, Frankenstein got to his
feet, titan legs widespread for better traction, making his way
step-by-step toward the shooters.

Obregon was giving orders to the riflemen. "Give him some more to make
it look good, then retreat--no, don't retreat now! Wait!"

The riflemen had lost their nerve when they saw that their bullets had
failed to stop the oncoming monster, who was closing fast.

Perhaps the way that Dracula's coffin had begun to rattle and vibrate
had also unnerved them.

With the bullets no longer hammering him, Frankenstein stood up, rising
to his full height, turning toward Dracula's coffin. Then he started
forward, his lack of anger or any other discernible emotion more ominous
than any such display would have been. From the deliberate way he moved,
it was clear that he meant business.

Dracula's coffin quaked. Did the vampire dread Frankenstein's approach,
or did he anticipate it as an opportunity to escape?

Frankenstein lumbered toward it. All those in the know held their breath
and the shooters held their fire. Perhaps that was what stirred the
monster's suspicions. Many traps had been set for him since his long-ago
creation; he knew about men and their traps.

His tread slowed; he paused, uncertain, wary, suspicious.

His eyes narrowed; was it possible that, behind them, the brain to which
they were attached was actually doing some calculating?

His gaping slitlike mouth twisted into a scowl; his head was cocked at a
speculative angle. The coffin was less than ten paces distant, the way
open and unbarred, and still the monster paused, hesitating.

Perhaps he may have noticed that there was a certain subtle but definite
depression hi the ground between him and the coffin. A dip, a hollow.
The ground was not entirely bare--some small tufts of grass and some
bushes grew there--but only small ones, and not many of them.

Mostly it was sandy, with lots of loose dirt.

The rest of the field was covered with a hard-pressed, compacted layer
of short tough turf, burned nearly colorless by the sun and crushed down
by the fort's heavy vehicle traffic.

Did the monster actually note such deviations from the pattern, or was
it instead warned by some kind of ani mallike intuitive sixth sense
nagging that all was not right, that there was danger here.

Kearny whispered, "Looks like the mark's wising up!"

Frankenstein looked around, like a hunting dog trying to pick up a scent
in the air. He noticed that not only had the shooting stopped, but that
everybody was looking at him.

Obregon said, "What is it he's looking at?" Kearny said, "He's looking
at us looking at him, waiting to see what he'll do!"

Snarling, the monster actually took a step back.

"Uh-oh, he smells a rat--"

Obregon's mouth turned down at the corners. "That does it. Now what do
we do?"

Engine noise sounded, a loud rude mechanical racket that broke the
stillness of the moment. It came from inside one of the repair sheds.
Frankenstein turned to meet it. The noise announced the advent of a
forklift truck, driven out of the shed with Breen at the wheel. The
machine was a boxy mini-tractor with a hooded open canopy and was
painted yellow with black trimming. The lift's two five-foot-long blades
were set at midbody height.

Breen opened it up full throttle, getting surprising speed from the
machine. He piloted it straight at the monster, bearing down on him.

At the last instant Frankenstein tried to dodge the advance,
sidestepping it. Breen allowed for that, nosing the lift to one side to
close with the monster.

The jarring collision caused the vehicle to stop dead in its tracks,
nearly throwing Breen from his seat at the controls. There was a
tremendous thunk of impact, denting the lift blades and jamming the
hoist mechanism.

Frankenstein was knocked backward, into the broad patch of suspect
ground in front of Dracula's coffin.

The solid-looking ground proved to be a cheat, a trick, collapsing
instantly under his weight.

No solid earth here, but rather a layer of dirt that had been spread
around to camouflage some layers of canvas tarpaulin, which were
stretched tight over the mouth of a pit, concealing it.

Frankenstein tumbled into the pit, whose outlines were now revealed. It
was about ten feet wide and fifteen feet deep. Earlier, it had been dug
out by a backhoe, with the detail work done by hastily rounded-up
prisoner work gangs.

From the bottom of the well of the pit came the monster's roar.

Jax Breen climbed down stiffly from the machine's driver's seat,
wincing, holding one hand to the back of his neck, his face pained.

Obregon and Kearny went to nun. Kearny said, "Nice work! He got wise to
the trap somehow. If you hadn't had that forklift for backup, we
wouldn't have gotten him."

"But we have got him," Breen said tightly, rubbing the back of his neck,
his expression still pained. "It's the old idea of the tiger pit. Like
they used to do in the old days, when they wanted a tiger. They'd stake
out a live goat for bait, and hope that when the tiger went for it, it'd
fall into the pit instead." Obregon said, "And so Dracula was your '
goat'?"

"In a manner of speaking. Yes, you could say so. Dracula's the goat."

They neared the pit, careful not to get too close to the edge.

Kearny said, "You can hear him going wild down there. I guess the fall
didn't hurt him much." Breen said, "No, and neither did a head-on
collision with a forklift truck."

"He's tough."

The bottom of the pit was a well of blackness, but enough light filtered
down to permit them to see the head, broad slab shoulders, and upraised
arms and fists of Frankenstein, raging down below. His eyes crackled
with blue fire. His fiendish expression showed the rage he felt at being
thwarted.

Frankenstein saw them. He tried to get at them, jumping, trying to claw
his way out of the pit.

But the hole was too deep for him to jump up and reach the rim. The
earth pit's sides were too smooth and sheer for him to get any
handholds. When he tried to gouge them out of the sides, the gritty
pumicelike dirt was unable to bear his weight and broke apart.

Frustration fueled the monster's ever-mounting rage.

He shook his fist at those standing at the edge of the pit, looking down
at him.

Kearny whistled. "Whew! Is he mad! I'd sure hate for him to get ahold of
me!" Breen said, "I know what you mean. I liked it better when he was
mad at Dracula instead."

Frankenstein began battering at the sides of the pit, hammering the dirt
walls that ringed him.

Obregon marveled. "What a brute--a gorilla!" Kearny said, "It won't take
that gorilla long to knock down enough dirt to fill the pit so he can
climb out of it." Breen said, "He'll be stopped before then. This pit
was never planned to hold him for long. Just long enough to get the job
done."

Now, under Sergeant Leopold's direction, Guards moved into action,
forming groups to unload the chemical drums from the back of the truck.

Kearny said, "We lost a couple of barrels along the way when the big
fellow first hitched a ride, but not too many. There should be enough."

Breen glanced at him. "There better be. This job has got to be one
hundred percent right, or else it all goes wrong."

"If we run short, we'll just get more barrels from the boatyard."

Obregon said, "We can start by sending a truck to pick up the barrels
that fell off on the hill road." "Can't hurt," Breen said. "Every little
bit helps."

Barrels were rolled near the edge of the pit Two men righted one of the
drums, one man using a pry bar to pop the top and open it The drumhead
lid fell clattering to the hard ground. Toxic fumes, thick and curling,
like the smoke off dry ice, wafted out of the barrel, with a heavy
industrial-strength chemical reek. Those nearby backed away, eyes
stinging, lungs burning.

Obregon, eyes tearing, covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief,
muffling his voice as he said, "Phew!

What is that stuff?" Breen said, "Plastiglas. It's a new kind of liquid
plastic, like fiberglass or epoxy. It's used a lot in boat repair.

The local boatyard used to do a helluva repair business during the good
times, with all the millionaires who sailed their yachts here to gamble
at the casino.

"The stuff has the capacity to stay liquid in the can, but after it's
exposed to the air, it soon hardens into an incredibly tough, durable
solid. That's why it's necessary to work fast, to keep the barrels
coming, set up an assembly line and fill the pit with plastiglas. Don't
delay, because the stuff is quick-hardening."

The Guards handling the chemical drums used torn T shirts and rags to
make bandannas covering their noses and mouths, providing some
protection from the fumes.

Work-gloved hands gripping the sides of the barrel, they tipped it over,
expelling its contents in great gluey billowing blue-gray-white washes
of fluid.

It all came crashing down on Frankenstein, smacking him square in his
upturned face.

Above, the empty barrel was rolled aside, while a fresh one was uncapped
and its contents dumped down into the pit.

Frankenstein was disoriented. The thick goo clung to his flesh, fogging
his eyesight, filling his nostrils and mouth. This was no water that he
could inhale, circulate through his lungs, extract the oxygen from, and
expel.

This was toxic. The membranes of his nostrils and at the back of his
throat reflexively sealed, blocking the "plastigoo"

from making any more headway invading his interior.

Of course, with his sinuses and windpipe sealed, he was no longer able
to breathe through them. He was blocked from fresh oxygen.

This presented no immediate problem. He could go for some time on the
oxygen stored in his tissues and bloodstream.

But the plastigoo was a problem. Scores of gallons were being poured
down onto his head, a torrent coming from three and four barrels at a
time being simultaneously upended into the pit.

The drum handlers had now been outfitted with gas masks, which had been
held nearby for just this eventuality.

The fumes rising from the pit were thick and choking, repelling all
those without gas masks and pushing them back a safe distance.

Jax Breen donned a gas mask so he could observe the process at first
hand. As did Obregon, commanding his men.

Discarded barrels thrummed hollowly as they were rolled aside, filling
the field with empties.

Frankenstein was like a mastodon trapped in a tar pit, a fly trapped in
glue. The earthen sides of the pit made a fine crucible to contain the
rising tide of plastigoo.

Frankenstein was at a loss ... how could he fight this?

Pooling in the pit, the rising tide of the stuff rose to his shoulders,
his chin. He straggled blindly. His eye sockets were thick with goo, and
the reptilian nictitating membranes that protected the orbs were unable
to shed the sticky stuff.

Liquid plastic got into his very pores, sealing them up.

Frankenstein's struggles grew less frantic as the stuff began swiftly
congealing, thickening, becoming a semisolid mass.

Still more barrels of the stuff were dumped into the pit. Breen said,
voice garbled by the gas mask, "Slow down now. We don't want to flood
the pit so he can float out of it."

The monster had survived apparent extinction many times, in part because
of its wonderfully adaptable metabolism.

Denied oxygen past a critical time, the body temporarily shut down,
hoarding its energies for all but a few dimly flickering life processes,
so that any examination, except the most minute and exacting one, one
that knew what to look for, would have delivered a finding that the
monster was indeed dead.

Now those autonomic processes took over, shutting down Frankenstein's
life functions to all but the most minimal.

Later, should conditions change, as for example if the monster were once
again exposed to fresh air, the process would just as surely reverse
itself.

After a while the thickest fumes over the pit began to disperse. The
fumes were a product of the compound's liquid phase, and as it
solidified, the evaporative fumes ceased.

The agitation in the pit had stopped, too. The pool of plastigoo filling
the pit was gelling. A kind of membranous "skin" formed over the top,
whose blue-gray milky color thickened as the stuff hardened.

Keamy said, "Frankenstein's stopped moving." Breen said, "When the stuff
finishes hardening, it'll be harder than a rock and he'll be encased in
it, a perfect museum specimen that comes complete with its own
container.

"For now, we'll just leave him inside there, like a fly caught in amber.
He'll keep. Later, after the stuff's finished hardening, we'll attach
some chains and haul him out of there, ready for shipping back to home
base."

Kearny eyed the shiny black coffin at the edge of the scene. It sat
inert, unmoving. "And Dracula?" Breen said, "He's quiet now. As long as
nobody disturbs that cross locked up inside the coffin with him, he's as
frozen in place there as Frankenstein will be in his plastic block."

In an excess of enthusiasm, Kearny rubbed his palms together, a flylike
gesture. "What a development! The two greatest freak-show attractions of
all time, Dracula and Frankenstein! Only instead of putting them on
display, we're taking them out of circulation." "That's right," Jax
Breen said. "These exhibits are about to be permanently retired."

Frankenstein was solidly entombed in his plastic block, and there were
no further stirrings from Dracula's coffin, and so the night watch
passed without incident. Still, it was a relief to see the pale
colorless light of predawn brighten the scene, mixing with the island's
misty morning haze.

Jax Breen and Dorian Winter stood in the shed where Dracula's coffin had
been moved. The coffin lay on the hard-packed dirt floor with its foot
facing the shed's open bay door. The guards who'd been posted to this
watch stood a dozen paces away, pointedly ignoring what was going on in
the shed.

Sometime during the night, Dorian had managed to wash up and had changed
into some clean clothes mat had been found for her. Her eyes were tired,
but she seemed otherwise unaffected by fatigue.

Breen said, "What do you get from Dracula? Is he aware, does he know
what's going on around him?" Dorian said, "He's aware. He's hurting.
Being pinned by the cross to his coffin, unable to feed, unable to bend
incidents to his benefit--this is torture to Dracula."

"I don't need a mind reader to tell me that. Maybe he'd like it better
if I just put a stake through his heart and be done with it."

"You won't. Your masters want him back intact."

"What do you know of such things?"

"That's the only reason for keeping so dangerous a creature as Dracula
... not alive, but continuing his existence."

"What you call my masters are masters of all in the occult world,
including you."

"We'll see if they can master Dracula and Frankenstein." "I've already
done that," Jax Breen said.

He could have had Frankenstein taken out of the hole by night without
too much risk, but had decided, at least until daylight, to more or less
give the overstressed underlings a chance to recover their wits and
nerve.

Now a winch and crane hoist mounted on a flatbed truck hauled the block
of hardened clear plastic out of the pit At this stage, it wasn't so
much a block as a gigantic plug, an ungainly semiclear lump of
solidified goo encasing a man-monster.

In its current shape, it was too unwieldy for traveling.

Workers armed with chain saws chopped it down to size, shaping it like
sculptors carving a giant block of ice. The saws sliced through the
sides in slab layers, peeling them off until the mammoth lump was
finally cut down to roughly an eight-feet-long rectangular cube.

Through its milky surface, shot through with discolored veins and layers
and speckled with streams of tiny

trapped air bubbles, could be seen a crude, manlike figure, a brutish
giant.

Dorian and Jax Breen stood facing it, in a tent where it had been
temporarily placed. As he'd done earlier with Dracula, Breen had the
sensitive conduct a mind probe of the seemingly immobilized monster.

Breen said, "What do you get off it? Anything? Make you tingle?"

She shrugged. "Not much. His mind's not completely blanked out. There's
something there, like a refrigerator hum. It tells you that the
machine's working, but that's all.

"The rest of him is dormant. Dracula is different. Night or day--it's
stronger at night, of course, when he is awake, but I can feel it in the
daytime too--you always know he's there, flitting around like a bat in
the attic, aware of everything.

"But Frankenstein is more or less just shut down, like an engine in
neutral--"

- Abruptly she winced, as if experiencing a sudden pain, squeezing her
eyes shut and putting a hand to the side of her head.

Breen picked up on it. "Something the matter? Are you all right?"

The spasm passed. She shuddered, shaking her head to clear it. "There
was something there, for an instant It was like peeling back the crust
and striking the red-hot magma below. A kind of molten awareness that
was so sharp and sudden that contacting it was like a knife in my head."

"Interesting. It means what?"

"I don't know, I'm not sure. But I wouldn't want to be around if he ever
breaks loose from that cube."

"If he does, you will be around, since the both of you are going back to
Visaria. So it's in your own best interest to keep me posted about any
change in his condition, mental or otherwise, no matter how small or
insignificant it might seem." Dorian said, "What do you need me for?" He
said, "You're the best source, the only eyewitness to the madness that's
been going on on this island. Not counting Frankenstein and Dracula, of
course, but under the circumstances, we can hardly expect them to be too
forthcoming.

"Besides, no one with your psychic talents can be allowed to run around
free and nonaligned, not in this day and age. Rogue witches are
dangerous."

"I'm a sensitive, not a witch. I didn't ask to be this way, I was born
with it. Uncle Basil was the magician. I was just his medium. I never
wanted any part of it. Now that it's done, I just want to go away and be
left alone."

Breen laughed. "Stop looking so tragic. You want to play the innocent
and hang it all on evil old Uncle'Basil, huh? Well, who knows? It could
even be true. But that's not for me to determine, that's for my masters.

"Your masters," he added.

The plane from Visaria arrived at midday, touching down at the airstrip
on the plateau not far north from Seaguard.

Jax Breen said, "Time to get everybody set for preflight."

Julie Evans guarded Dorian, who was not under physical restraint. But
that was more a vote of confidence in Julie's abilities than in Dorian's
trustworthiness. Julie stayed close to her charge, projecting a
rough-and-ready eagerness for violence that she was clearly holding in
check.

Dorian said, "Why do you want to hurt me?"

Julie pretended to look surprised, but she wasn't trying very hard. "Who
says I do?"

"You do. Inside."

Julie shrugged her broad athlete's shoulders. "Well, why deny it? Sure,
I'd like to come down on you hard, put a hurting on you."

"Why? I've done nothing to you."

"Because that's what I like to do, honey. I like to hurt people. It
turns me on. I'm a satanist."

"Sadist, you mean."

"That, too. And by the way, missy, that kind of petty little
hairsplitting is something that really irritates me. And I don't like
you all that much to start with."

Overhearing them, Kearny said, "Now, girls, play nice."

Julie said, "Drop dead." He said, "Around here, that's what they call a
good career move. Anyway, Breen told me to tell you that we'll be moving
out hi about five minutes."

"Good. It can't be any too soon for me. Any minute longer we stay on
this flea-bitten tropical dumpsite is a minute too long."

The plastic cube that entombed Frankenstein was hoisted onto the back of
a flatbed track, covered with a canvas tarp, and secured in place with
chains and binders.

Breen said, "Okay. Now, what about Dracula?"

Kearny indicated a civilian delivery-type truck that had been backed up
to the motor-pool loading site. "We're going to transport him in that."
Breen, disbelieving, said, "That? It's a bread truck!"

"It's the best we could do, Jax. Listen, there weren't that many trucks
to start with on the island, and that was before all the rioting and the
looting and the craziness.

Be glad we got tins. For a while I didn't think it was going to make it
up the Mil."

Breen eyed die truck, dubious. "At least it's got a sealed box." Kearny
said, "So does Dracula, only his doesn't have wheels on it" The other
sighed. "All right, I suppose it'll have to do.

Get some Guards and load the coffin in the back of the truck." Keamy
asked, "Hey, who's going to ride with him?" "I will," Breen said.

"I'd've thought you'd had enough of him by now."

That's not it I'm the only one I trust not to fall under his spell."

"The rest of us are too weak-minded, huh?" "You said it, Kearny, not
me."

"Sure, but you're not denying it"

The vehicles slated to make the short trip to the airfield shaped up as
a mini-convoy.

There was the bread truck, the flatbed truck carrying Frankenstein, a
Jeep in which Julk Evans and Dorian sat in the rear seats, and a pickup
truck with a squad of troops in it, to provide firepower or strong backs
as required.

lax Breen rode in the back of the truck, alone with Dracula's coffin.
Breen kept the roll-up rear hatch door open, but even men, it was
stifling inside. He sat on a crate against the wall near the rear
hatchway, holding to a rail with one hand. Dracula's coffin was deeper
in the truck box, secured in place. The truck's van box exuded a faint
but distinctive smell of fresh bread.

The caravan went on the move, leaving Seaguard behind and following the
roadway norm across the tametop plateau. About a half mile beyond the
castle, on the in land side of the road, was a cleared tract of land
that marked the airstrip.

On the way, they passed a few huts. Not many people chose to live so
close to Seaguard, and of those few, none could now be seen. The
inhabitants were hiding out to avoid being taken for any of the prisoner
work gangs the Guards had been Founding up. Now that the monsters were
neutralized and the riots quelled, a big job of rebuilding lay ahead.
Forced labor was one way to keep costs down.

Breen had succumbed to a kind of drowsy rhythm, watching the scenery
roll by. Up here on the plateau, the view was fairly monotonous. From
this angle, the sea could no longer be seen. The view on the landward
side was not particularly inspiring, consisting of fringes of palm trees
bordering weedy, overgrown thickets.

As the caravan neared the airfield, the paved road met a crossroad
running inland from east to west. A one-lane dirt road, it was lined on
both sides by fields of thick, overgrown tangled brush. There were no
farms here, and the uncultivated fields were overgrown with weeds.

Idly glancing up at the crossroad, Breen was surprised to see a figure
standing at the edge of the woods, just inside the brush, watching the
line of vehicles go by.

He was even more surprised when he recognized the man. "Soto ... ?!"

That goosed him to his feet. Breen stood up, clutching the edge of the
wall to keep his balance. Holding on, he leaned out the back of the
truck, craning for a view of the thicket where he'd seen the apparition.

In the Jeep behind him, the riders looked at him, wondering what was the
pitch. He was making them nervous and they began anxiously handling and
fiddling with their weapons.

The caravan kept rolling on, heedless. Breen stared, straining to see
through the heat, dust, and stinging sweat that blurred his vision, but
Soto was nowhere to be seen.

But it was Soto. Breen wasn't die type to doubt die evidence of his own
eyes. A snapshot of the brief encounter was burned into his brain. Soto
had stood at die corner of die thicket, obscured by brush, so that only
die upper half of him showed. The greenery had screened him from
everybody else in die caravan. They were all looking forward, up die
road, but only Breen riding in die back of die delivery truck was
looking backward, and thus had been the only one to see him.

Soto!

At best, Soto was a cool-nerved killer and gangland executioner. But in
the brief glimpse Breen had had of him, Soto was far from looking at his
best The ordinarily dapper gunman wore a filthy jacket and shirt, die
front of which was stained with stuff that looked tike dried blood, and
lots of it

For that matter, he'd looked kind of sallow, with dull yellow-white skin
and dark staring eyes. Breen squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing diem, but
even widi his eyes closed, Soto's hollow-eyed gaze, floating hi die ah-
in front of his face, haunted him.

What to do? What could Breen do? In die time he'd stood gaping, die
caravan had rounded a bend, leaving die crossroad behind. The airfield
was coming up. He couldn't stop the caravan and have them go back and
look for die man. Who die hell was Soto, anyway? A hoodlum, a gangster
who'd been down here on behalf of his East Coast mob masters who were
investigating die pos sibility of using Isla Morgana's offshore banking
connections to launder millions in illicit drug money.

Then somehow Soto had gotten tangled up with Dorian and her uncle Basil,
and gone hunting for Dracula's treasure in the valley of the zombies.

What was he doing here? Breen asked himself for the hundredth time. More
important, what could he do? As the man who'd trapped Dracula in his
coffin and captured and subdued Frankenstein, Breen should have been
feeling able to eat a half-dozen Sotos for breakfast. But it wasn't
happening. Soto had the psychological jump on him, had from the start.
There was something about the gangster that he'd always found
intimidating, chilling.

Perhaps it was because Soto was able to be so coldly ruthless and
effective without the benefit of schooling in satanic doctrine, as Breen
and his associates had been.

He guessed that Soto was just one of those naturals, an evildoer who
came by because it was his nature. Breen liked to think of himself as a
philosopher of evil, while Soto had no such lofty pretensions. He merely
thought of himself as a businessman. No wonder he was so dangerous!

Well, if he was smart, he'd keep out of Breen's sight, if he wanted to
keep on living. His nearness to the airfield explained a lot.
Undoubtedly Soto wanted to get off island too, and he was sneaking up on
the airport to reconnoiter.

The caravan turned left off the highway, entering the airport grounds.
There was a wide spacious tract of land with a handful of clumped
buildings, a weather and flight control tower, a terminal, some hangars
and gas pumps and the like.

The area was under Guard control. It had been one of the first areas
stabilized, after everybody who could buy their way off the island had
already done so and taken off in their private planes.

Guard troops now held the site. A sleek, medium-sized cargo jet sat near
the terminal, a crew of mechanics and attendants puttering around it,
making the plane ready for takeoff.

The flatbed truck and the delivery truck drove around the terminal,
pulling up near the Visaria cargo jet, a streamlined white aircraft with
smart black and red trim.

Members of the plane's flight crew could be distinguished by their dark
gray-green uniforms. Not only was there a normal flight crew of pilot,
copilot, navigator, and attendants, there was also a security-squad
contingent of about eight men in khaki outfits and combat boots, armed
with neat, compactly efficient mini-assault rifles slung on shoulder
straps. Even in the wilting heat, they looked crisp, competent, and
lethal.

Their leader was a man with a shiny well-scrubbed pink face and short
lank yellow-white hair that lay limply on top of his rounded head. He
was wide-bodied, with broad shoulders, thick torso, big arms, and thick
thighs.

He had no assault weapon but was equipped with a bolstered sidearm.

He said, "I'm Ogden, in charge of the security detail. I understand that
this cargo will require special handling." Jax Breen said, "More special
than you might expect, at least as far as the coffin is concerned. Are
the special generators and UV projectors I ordered on board?"

"Yes, everything has been provided according to your specifications."

Indicating the flatbed truck, Breen said, "That big cube block is secure
and ready for loading. But the coffin re quires special rigging. It's
safer outside, under the sun, until I've got the special projectors up
and running. We'll load the coffin last."

For their part, the Seaguard troops seemed less concerned about the
threat of external attack than they were about the tarp-covered cube and
the coffin, which were placed on the tarmac near the plane, in
preparation for loading.

Kearny said, "I'd like to see the cargo manifest for this flight!"

Ignoring him, Jax Breen sought out Dorian, who sat on a crate in the
plane's shade, with Julie Evans hovering nearby.

Confronting her, Breen said, "You lied."

Dorian looked blandly at him. "How so?" "You said Soto was dead."

"Soto? He is dead."

"Yeah, well, he's up and walking around now."

Dorian looked mildly surprised. "I thought he was dead.

He certainly looked dead, the last time I saw him, outside the old mill
at the plantation.

"What makes you think he's not dead? Have you seen him?"

"Yes, briefly."

"Where?"

"Too close for comfort."

"His or yours?"

"His. I don't know what he's got in mind, but if dares to show himself
here, I'll have him blasted to kingdom come."

Dorian shrugged. "What's that to me?"

"You tell me. You were involved with him."

"I'd hardly call it that. He was a business partner of Uncle Basil's. He
had some notion of using Soto as a kind of bodyguard to keep him alive."

"That's one idea that didn't work out" "Apparently not," Dorian said.
"That was the extent of my '.'"

Julie Evans, who'd been listening silently up to now, chimed in. "That's
not what I heard. I heard that you and Soto were doing the nasty."

"You would hear that kind of thing," Dorian said.

"What of it? Surely you of all people don't think that sex means
anything beyond a purely physical transaction? I thought it was one of
your order's precepts, not to be sentimental about such things."

"Maybe so. But you're not one of us, missy."

"I was Uncle Basil's property from the time I was twelve. That should
tell you something. He wasn't exactly a sentimentalist, either."

Breen eyed her shrewdly. "Then it won't bother you if I give orders to
have Soto shot on sight?" Dorian said, "If you think you can kill him,
go right ahead. His life or death means nothing to me."

"Fine. I just wanted to straighten out that little business so there
won't be any misunderstandings if Soto winds up with a bullet in the
head." Looking him straight in the eye, Dorian said seriously, "Here's
the straight truth--as far as I'm concerned, he's already dead." "Fair
enough," Breen said. He turned to Julie Evans.

"Get her inside the plane and don't let her out of your sight. I'll
supervise the loading of the cargo."

"Right." Julie gave Dorian a slight shove. "Let's go, missy."

They climbed a boarding ladder, disappearing into the midsection of the
plane's sleekly tapering gut

Breen looked around, scanning the south side of the facility. From here,
he could see the crossroad where he'd spotted Soto. It was deserted now,
empty. Would he come by that direction, or would he try a flanking
maneuver, approaching from an unexpected direction, such as the north?

Assuming he came at all. But why would he want to?

What was his objective? What was in it for him?

To rescue Dorian? That was a laugh. Soto was a cold, remorseless killer,
an innate believer in survival of the fittest. He wouldn't stick his
neck out to save a damsel in distress, not unless there was something
big in it for him. A big payoff.

Dorian was valuable, but not in the way that a hoodlum could comprehend.
The idea of him having the foresight to try to take Dorian because she
was a sensitive was laughable. Even if he had the brains to know what a
wild talent was, he wouldn't have the vision to try and use her for
himself.

Or would he? Breen couldn't see a cynical ultrareal ist like Soto
risking all just to play occult talent scout.

On the other hand, the Isla Morgana experience might well have made him
a believer. After you've seen zombies, Dracula, and Frankenstein, it's
hard to rationalize away the power of the Dark World.

Anyway, Breen had more important concents than trying to forecast the
next moves of an admittedly vicious and cunning criminal who in the end
was merely human, unlike the temporarily checked Dracula and
Frankenstein.

Having those two in tow was like shepherding a couple of thermonuclear
devices.

But then Breen got to thinking. Soto was a killer, a killer for hire.
Perhaps his true goal was Breen himself.

To kill him.

In the satanic order lax Breen served, where overweening pride and
murderous ambition were no sins but rather virtues to be exalted,
assassination was just a hardball version of office politics. Breen had
connived to bring about the downfall and occasional elimination of those
who'd stood in his way on the path to power.

Who would want to have him eliminated? Who would benefit the most by his
demise? There were many candidates for that role, but none of them were
here. Except Julie Evans. Who better? She was his assistant. If be was
scratched from the hierarchy, she'd move up into his spot.

Not that he'd put it past her, to want him liquidated.

But Julie was a killer and could do the job herself, if it came to that
But then again, maybe she didn't want it to come to that Maybe she
wanted deniability.

Or maybe he was just spooking himself, thinking too hard. But his
position demanded that he stay on top of all the variables. Paranoia was
a necessary evil, a strategy for survival. That was the hell of it

Breen turned his back to the south, looking at the plane.

Grouped near the open rear cargo hatch were Obregon and a couple of
sidemen.

That gave Breen an idea. Obregon just wanted to be the island boss.
Breen was preparing to depart, leaving the other with a clear field for
his ambitions and the gratitude of Visarian interests for his efforts on
their behalf.

Another small service would hardly be too much to ask, especially since
it involved only a single small killing.

Breen went to him. Obregon and his Guard associates were watching as the
tarp-covered block cube was un loaded from the flatbed and lifted up
into the cargo hatchway.

Breen said, "Sorry to see them go?"

Obregon vigorously shook his head. "Those monsters almost ruined
everything. It took years to build up Isla Morgana to where it was, and
in a few days and nights they came close to tearing it all down.

"Once they are gone, we can start making some real money. The island is
perfect for gambling, drugs, and offshore banking. Dracula was dragging
us down."

Breen nodded. "Yes, that's the trouble with Dracula and his land.
They're history. They don't understand the modern world. Why go to the
trouble of making zombies, when there's already so many live fools
willing to enslave themselves and enrich their masters?"

Obregon took out a big fat cigar, bit the end off it, and spat it out.
Breen used his lighter to set fire to the end of the cigar as Obregon
puffed blue-gray smoke clouds.

Breen said, "Sorry we're leaving you with the headache of undertaking a
big coverup."

The other shrugged. "With the zombies and vampires and monsters gone, a
cover-up operation is easy. We can claim that all the rest was people
just seeing things, because they'd gone loco from the riots. Besides,
the world will pay little notice to the internal troubles of a small
tropical island in the Caribbean."

Breen looked doubtful. "Some of those captive work gangs saw a little
too much for my liking."

Obregon exhaled mightily before replying. "When I return to the castle,
I will give orders to have them done away with. What is one more pile of
bones in the vaults?"

"A sensible precaution," Breen agreed.

Obregon airily waved his fuming cigar. "As for my men, let them talk.
They are such notorious liars that nobody would believe them anyway."
Breen said delicately, "There's one piece of business I hate to leave
unfinished, though." Obregon said, too casual, "Oh? And what is that?"

"Not monster business. Personal business. There's a man, another gringo.
His name is Soto."

Obregon puffed, nodding thoughtfully. "Yes, I have heard of this man. My
late chief, Major Quantez, had some dealings with him."

"Solo's that unfinished business I mentioned."

"Oh? I had heard that he was dead."

"I saw him lurking around the crossroad as we drove up here before."

"Really? You astonish me."

"I'd take care of it myself, but time presses and I've got to go. Still,
I'd like to leave knowing that Soto's in good hands."

"Certainly," Obregon said, genial. "I will take care of it right now, if
you like."

"Please, don't trouble yourself. Later will be fine ... as long as it's
not too much later."

"It is no trouble at all, Senor Breen. That is our job.

And my pleasure. Who knows? Perhaps I can bag him before you take off."

Obregon went off, with Sergeant Leopold and two other Guards following.
They climbed into a Jeep, with Obregon in the front passenger side. The
Jeep lurched, speeding away, as Obregon waved a farewell salute to Jax
Breen.

The Jeep rolled south on the highway, toward the cross road. On the
right, a row of roadside brash screened the road from the airfield.

A figure suddenly stepped out of the shadowy green bushes, looking north
at the oncoming Jeep, waving it down. Obregon sat up straight, seized by
excitement.

"That's him! Soto!"

The driver stomped the gas pedal, speeding up. Soto dodged back into the
greenery, out of sight. Obregon said, "Careful, men. Our man is a Yankee
gangster and killer, a dangerous man. Take no chances. Shoot first,
shoot fast, and shoot to kill." Leopold laughed. "As if we need to be
told that!" One of the Guards said, "An American gangster! He should be
carrying a big bankroll."

Obregon gave him one of those if-lookscould-kill looks. "Keep your
filthy hands out of his pockets, if you know what's good for you!"

"Sorry, jefe, I was just talking."

"Don't talk. Shut up and listen. The gringo can shoot, so don't let him
get the drop on you."

The Jeep bounced to a halt on the shoulder of the road, near where Soto
had ducked into the brush. The Guards hopped out of the vehicle, weapons
drawn.

Obregon motioned with his pistol. "Leopold will go with me this way and
you other two go that way. We'll trap him between us and close in--"

Just then there was a rustling sound in the wall of brush opposite them,
and a figure stepped back into view.

Leopold fired, chopping slugs into the intruder.

"All right, stop shooting! You got him!"

Soto stood leaning forward, one hand holding on to a slender tree trunk
for support

"What is keeping him up ... T Soto released his grip on the tree and
moved forward.

They could see his hands were empty.

"No gun ...!"

"He still comes!" Obregon said, "Hold your fire!" He squinted, sweat
stinging his eyes, snarling, his gun leveled. "He's mine."

Soto came out from beneath the trees, into the naked sunlight.

"Somebody hit him. Look at him, he is all shot up!"

"The blood ... I"

Soto's front was stiff with dried brick-colored bloodstains.

His movements were stiff, a bit clumsy. His eyes were hollows, his skin
was sallow and tautly stretched across the bones of his face. His eyes
stared, unblinking.

"Are those bullet holes in his shirtfront?"

"It's hard to see, with all that dried blood!"

Obregon shook his head in wonder. Half admiringly, he grudgingly said,
"That's one tough gringo!"

He leveled the gun. "Adios, amigo--"

Grinning tightly, he hammered some slugs into die other's chest and
torso. Soto twisted and spun, throwing his arms up, falling backward
into a palm tree, slumping against it, sliding down it to come to a halt
in a sitting position, propped up against the trunk, head hanging down.

Obregon said, "You see, men, that's how to shoot ..."

The Guardia leader's words trailed off as Soto raised his chin from his
chest, glaring up at the others through the tops of his eye sockets. He
stood up.

The Guards staggered back, into the road. Soto followed.

Leopold blasted some more slugs into Soto. Belatedly, the others joined
in, squeezing off round after round that sieved the vicious gangster. He
swayed, arms held out from his sides, trying to keep his balance under
the bulleting. He looked like he was surfing as much as suffering.

"Sobrenatural!"

The Guards had clearly had enough. Leopold clambered behind the Jeep's
steering wheel. Obregon said, "Filthy coward! Get out of that Jeep!"

"I'm getting out of here!"

At this, Obregon shot him in the back. Leopold lurched forward, punched
between the shoulder blades by a big fat slug that blew stuff out his
front. He bounced off the dashboard and sat down hard in the driver's
seat, flinging one lifeless arm over the edge, slumping over to one
side.

The other two Guards, who'd also been rushing the Jeep, changed course
and started running south, down the road.

Soto laughed. The sound had an eerie, inhuman quality, as if disembodied
and delivered from some echoing void. Not the product of human
articulation, lungs, tongue, mouth, and breath, but a ghostly voice from
beyond the grave, Made creepier still by sounding in daylight This was
one laugh that simply didn't belong in the light of day.

Nor did the laugher.

The two fugitive Guards threw away their guns so they could run faster.

Soto moved on Obregon, mocking. "Game for the fight, eh? Brave soul!"

Obregon took careful aim, adopting shooting-range mode, holding his gun
arm straight out from his side, pointing it at Soto's head. He squeezed
the trigger. The shot struck Soto in the left eye, blowing the eye out
of the socket.

Soto froze. "Ouch," he said dispassionately.

Where the eye had been, in the depths of its exploded socket, a
yellow-green glob of light began to glow, an unnatural orb to replace
the one which had been destroyed.

Obregon said, "Die, damn you, die! Why won't you die?!"

"Because I'm already dead," Soto replied, reaching for him. He took hold
of Obregon's throat and squeezed.

In the plane, in a rear cargo hold, Frankenstein and Dracula were
carefully stowed. Frankenstein had been placed upright against the
compartment's aft bulkhead. Crisscrossed rigging sealed the slablike
block into position, immobilizing it for the trip. The monolith looked
like a block of dirty gray ice. To the cargo handlers, it was always a
shock to touch its surface, expecting to feel cold, and instead finding
that the block was at room temperature.

It was even more of a shock to see the monster inside it.

At the opposite end of the hold, near the hatchway door in the
compartment's forward bulkhead, lay Dracula's coffin. It, too, had been
secured in place for the trip, locked to the top of a metal-frame
trestle table.

But something extra had been installed for the vampire lord.

The oblong box was surrounded by banks of floodlight-type lights, housed
in shiny dish-shaped metal reflectors, which were clustered on vertical
metal support trees and overhead fixtures. All were aimed at the coffin,
up, down, and sideways.

Kearny said, "What's with all the lights?"

Breen reached into a box that held a dozen or so pairs of wraparound
sunglasses. He fit a pair onto his face, sheathing his eyes in a
curvilinear black-green plastic visor.

"Put one of these on, Kearny."

Kearny, puzzled, shrugged, then donned the sunglasses.

Breen threw a switch. There was a shunting sound of a relay clicking
into place, a hum, and then the lights all began to glow at their cores,
blazing up with radiant orange-yellow light and warmth.

Breen said, "Step under the lamps, if you want to get the sunburn of
your life.

"They're sunlamps, more rugged portable versions of the type used in
tanning salons. Specifically, they're ultraviolet-ray projectors. UV
rays, the same kind of rays found naturally in sunlight. And sunlight is
toxic to Dracula."

Below the near-opaque sun visor, Kearny grinned. "I get it! If Dracula
breaks out of his coffin, he'll be fried to a crisp!"

"That's right. For him, it'd be like being out in broad daylight. It'd
be his finish. He'd probably burst into flame and burn to a cinder."

"That'd be something to see! But isn't he stuck in the coffin, like last
night, because of the cross that's in with him?"

Breen stepped back, away from the radiant light bath.

"Now, that's the question. The cross held him last night, but who knows
how long the binding spell will last? It might be a localized thing,
that loses its force once we actually break physical contact with the
island when we take off.

"And Visaria itself is a generator of sorcerous energy, which might be
strong enough to neutralize the spell.

Dracula will take power from it, just by being there. Black magic is the
sea that Visaria swims in. That's how they like it at the citadel.

"According to schedule, we should arrive in Visaria before sundown, but
these lights are just an added precaution."

Kearny mopped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve.

"Those lamps get hot fast! It's burning up in here!"

"If you think that's hot, try stepping directly under the lamps."

"No thanks, Jax. It'd be like being in a microwave oven."

Breen switched off the sunlamps. The instant relief was like a dip into
a cool bath.

Kearny crossed to the bulkhead. "I'm still hot. I'm going outside, where
I can breathe."

"Don't go too far, we're going to take off soon," Breen cautioned. But
he followed Kearny out of the plane, after posting a sentry in the
compartment, with the door open.

He said, "Now Dracula won't be able to cook up any tricks behind locked
doors."

Breen and Kearny stood on the tarmac, in the plane's shadow. The last of
the cargo had been loaded into the jet. The plane's own crew of
mechanics had finished their preflight maintenance and safety check. The
fuel tanks had been topped off.

From a distance came a series of popping sounds.

Kearny said, "Sounds like shooting."

Others on the field had also heard the noise, and were looking around,
trying to determine from where the shots were coming.

Suddenly Breen felt a chill down his back and cried, "Soto!"

"Huh? What do you mean, Jax?"

"Never mind, Keamy. Obregon got his man after all."

There was a lull in the shooting, then another blistering fusillade,
like a string of firecrackers going off. Then silence.

Jax Breen said, "So long, Soto."

A carload of Guards drove off to investigate. A few hundred yards south
on the airport road, they saw Obregon's Jeep standing on the side of the
road, its motor running.

The Guard car slowed. The Jeep's driver was a stranger, a gringo, and a
damned mangy looking one at that. Beside him, propped up in the
passenger seat, with eyes bulging in a darkly swollen face, sat Obregon.

Soto pointed south, down the road, where in the distance could be seen
the antlike blur of the two still-fleeing Guards. "Get them! Those dogs
are trying to escape!"

The driver started to take off, but before he could step on the gas, one
of the Guards in the car said, "Hold it.

Something's wrong here." Soto said, "Obregon says for you to get going!
That's an order!" The skeptic said, "I didn't hear him say anything." A
second man said, "He doesn't look so good."

A third said, "He looks dead."

Soto raised a gun and started shooting. It was a big caliber handgun mat
was capable of putting a slug through an engine block, disabling it. It
played hell on mere flesh and blood.

Soto emptied the gun into the men in the car. They got off one or two
shots, none of them coming close. Not that they would have done any good
anyway.

Leaving the charnel carload standing in the middle of the road, Soto put
the Jeep in gear and drove away. The sudden start caused Obregon's
strangled corpse to fall face forward against the dashboard.

He drove south to the crossroad, nearing the running duo of fugitives
from the Jeep. He honked the horn jauntily at them a few times. They ran
faster. They were already near dropping from exhaustion, but when they
saw who was at the wheel, waving at them with one hand, they speeded up
again.

Soto turned right, traveling west on the dirt road, kicking up plenty of
dust. Earlier, when he'd come through here on foot, he'd noticed a place
where the brush lining the edge of the airfield was thin.

He drove to it. Through gaps and pathways in the brush, he could see the
airfield. He plowed through the bushes, breaking into a stony, weedy
field stretching toward the airport.

He drove toward it, using the backs of hangar buildings for cover, the
Jeep kicking up dust. Keeping the hangars between him and the terminal
guards, he was able to creep up quite close to the airstrip. The hangars
were empty, abandoned earlier during the great exodus from the island.

The Air Visaria plane was firing up its jets when the Jeep drove out
from behind the hangar and across the airfield, angling toward a fuel
pump. It got pretty close before the Guards began to grow alarmed.

The plane was beginning to move, its jets sounding a muted banshee wail
of power held in check and about to cut loose.

The Jeep bore down on the fuel pumps, not slowing, speeding up. Ignoring
shouted warnings to halt, it kept on barreling forward.

Some Guards started shooting at it. A marksman took careful aim at the
driver and fired, shooting him through the chest. He knew he'd hit the
man, because he was using a high-powered scoped rifle and he actually
saw a little puff of dust raised off the man's shirt when the bullet
went through him.

Only the man kept on driving, leering with a death's head grin. The
marksman was so nonplussed that he didn't think to shoot again.

Others did, but the Jeep kept right on coming, closing on those fuel
pumps. When it was obvious that a collision was imminent, those in the
pump area stopped shooting and started running.

As impact neared, with the Jeep having built up a good head of momentum,
Soto threw himself out of the vehicle.

He hit the ground hard and cartwheeled across the landscape, in a fall
that would have broken the neck of any normal man. It broke his neck,
too, but what did he care?

The Jeep hurtled into the fuel pumps, snapping them off from the
concrete pad in which they were set. Fuel started gushing everywhere.

The Jeep crashed, accordioning, its gas tank bursting.

Pieces of jagged metal, sections of undercarriage, all struck showers of
sparks from the pavement.

It only took one single spark to touch off a conflagration in the
volatile fuel-oil mixture. With an oxygen eating whoomp, the spreading
pool of fuel burst into a lake of orange-red flames. In its center lay
the crumpled heap of the Jeep, burning, sizzling.

The airfield was a scene of mad chaos. The blaze raised billowing black
clouds, thick and choking, a curtain of smoke.

The jet plane turned tail to the blaze, pointing its nose straight down
the runway, as the engines began to whine faster and more furiously,
generating the brute power necessary for takeoff.

Amidships in the fuselage, in the main cabin, a lounge type area with
carpeted floor and a cluster of luxurious padded seats, were Jax Breen,
Julie Evans, Kearny, Dorian, and some security men. The jet was too
small to carry all the security squad and most of them had stayed behind
with Ogden to help restore order on the island.

They were certainly getting off to a bad start.

Through the cabin-body windows, on the side facing the terminal and gas
tanks, could be seen a rising wall of orange flames and thick black
smoke. Firelight flooded through the windows, turning them into glowing
orange ovals, viewports on an inferno.

Breen said, "Soto! I don't know how he did it, but he did! Too late,
though--we're taking off!"

Below the pump pad lay underground fuel tanks. The blaze now reached
them, detonating the tanks, turning them into giant firebombs that made
what had gone before look tame.

The pilot and copilot were occupied on the approach for takeoff while
everybody else on the plane watched the ripping, rising blasts.

Due to their angle of vision, crew and passengers were unable to see to
the approach of an awkward, shambling, sinister stick figure that
scuttled toward them with the speed and nimbleness of an undersea crab.

It approached from the tail, overtaking the plane while it was still
jockeying for position, final adjustments for takeoff being made at the
head of the runway.

The plane started moving forward, rolling at a speed of a few miles per
hour, but with an inexorable juggernaut quality. Scrambling along beside
it, Soto hooked his arms around the vertical strut column of the landing
gear, stepping up onto a protective flange that housed the paired sets
of solid rubber tires.

The plane increased its forward motion, wind resistance tugging at the
stowaway. Above him, set into the fuselage, was a recessed bay where the
landing gear would nestle for the rest of the flight, once it was
retracted.

The jet bucked, accelerating, its engines winding out into supersonic
walls of noise, the aircraft speeding along the runway, thrust
increasing.

Soto climbed, pulling himself up into the bay, molding his body around
the struts, cables, and hydraulic lines.

Once he was in the bay, the terrible rising wind resistance ceased
trying to tear him from his perch--not that it could loosen his death
grip. His hands would have torn off at the wrists first.

The runway below him was a blur of motion as the plane raced for the far
end of the runway. The scene turned bright orange from the lurid glow of
the fiery explosions that were devastating the airfield and its
buildings.

The plane's nose lifted, its forward wheels left the ground, its
twin-engine jets screaming into overdrive as it began climbing at a
steep angle.

When it became airborne, Kearny let out the breath he'd been holding.
"Whew! For a second I didn't think we were going to clear those trees at
the end of the runway!"

Powerful motors thrummed as machinery retracted the rear landing gear,
folding the mechanism into its bay like a jackknife being closed up.

It was a tight fit in the bay for Soto, as hatch doors sealed shut,
making the underside of the fuselage a smooth, unbroken thing.

In the bay, it was dark black, cramped and confined.

Soon there would be no oxygen in the arctic cold of stratospheric
heights as the jet plowed its way across the sky, crossing the Atlantic
Ocean and making for its ultimate and final destination.

Visaria.

The sight of the conflagration was striking as the plane lofted, the
island below becoming prismatic and jewellike in the precise, intricate
etching of crazy-quilt fields and thickets of green tropical growth.

As the plane outflew the mountain of burly black smoke that thrust
itself up into the sky, the passengers could see the destruction in
three dimensions.

Breen said, "That works out for us quite nicely. With the airfield
destroyed, the press won't be flying in in a hurry. By the time they get
there, the cleanup should be taken care of."

Below, in the landing-gear bay, there was no heat, light, or air.
Nothing human could have survived for more than a few minutes as the jet
punched its way up and up, into the remote heights.

Now that he had gotten to where he was, and had time to think, Soto
wondered what he was doing here. It had been an urgent, imperative,
all-consuming desire that he smuggle himself aboard this flight. Not for
an instant had he questioned the tightness of it, or deviated by the
slightest degree from this reckless course.

Now, for the first time, he wondered ... why?

Wondering didn't supply any answers. It made no sense. Rescue Dorian?
Dead or alive, he didn't like her all that much. She hadn't even been
very good in bed.

Yet here he was.

Was he the masterless zombie he thought he was?

Something had pulled him here and there was no denying the authority,
the inexorability of that wordless command.

Meanwhile, in the plane, Dorian settled back in her seat, permitting
herself the tiniest and most short-lived of self-satisfied smiles.

Sunset in Visaria, where the last light of day was a razor line in the
west, at the curve of horizon. All the city lights were already ablaze.
Visaria had a curious custom, whereby the street lamps came on at least
a half hour before sundown. Darkness pressed hard here and the human
part of the citizenry didn't like to be caught in the dark.

Just as the last traces of light were swallowed by night, a hairline
crack appeared in the lid of a coffin in a secret underground chapel far
below the Science Palace.

The crimson coffin of Marya Zaleska.

The lid swung open smoothly, noiselessly, on hinges that had been oiled
by that most diabolical of lubricants, the fat of babies, collected and
rendered. The inside of the coffin was lined with black velvet, deep and
dark as a starless night.

Outside, as the last dying rays of light faded away, the vampire in the
coffin shuddered and opened her eyes.

Marya lay on her back, white hands folded across her chest. She looked
dead, not sleeping. Corpselike. Her hair was thick, stiff, and matted.
Her bloodless face was drawn and strained, her skin a dirty white
pallor, the hollows of her eyes a bruised blue black. Her lips were
caked with dried reddish-brown blood, a droplet of which now clung to a
corner of her mouth.

It was pitch-dark in the crypt to human eyes, but not to hers. She could
see in the dark. Her h'ps parted, cracking the patina of dried blood
that had caked there. Her fangs thrust out past the curve of her lips. A
long snaky red tongue, forked at the tip like a serpent's tongue, thrust
out from between her fanged jaws, unrolling bannerlike, questing.

With sudden striking movements, it stabbed the droplet of dried blood in
the corner of her mouth, avidly licking it up.

She sat up, a clawlike hand gripping the edge of the coffin. That side
of the coffin, opposite the one on which the hinged coffin lid folded
back, was marked with countless scratches, from all the endless nights
she'd once more cheated life and death to rise from her coffin, Undead.

She climbed out of the coffin, stepping down to a stone floor. She
raised her arms above her head, stretching, her spine cracking and
popping into place as she flexed her stiff muscles.

A hand brushed a stone arch, dislodging a centipede that clung to the
side of the wall. It tumbled into her hair, and started wriggling among
the tresses. Her snake's tongue stabbed out, zapping it, whipping it
between her teeth, where she crunched it between her fangs, savoring the
tangy squirt of its life juices.

She sucked it dry and spit out the husk with eerie precision, hitting
one of the bats that flitted around the chamber's vaulted ceiling.

In the early part of the fifteenth century, a company of rogues,
freebooters, and mercenaries calling itself the Iron Brotherhood had
been chartered to go on yet another crusade against the infidel
Saracens. But the Ottoman Empire was far and the north alpine country
was near and the Brotherhood had been diverted from its quest to pillage
and conquer this area. They'd laid waste to the Frankenthal, the river
valley named for the Franks, under the shadow of a mountain peak known
as the Rock, or Stone of the Franks, the

"Frankenstein."

The knightly order had built its castle and central fortress in what was
now Visaria, on the lakeside knoll currently occupied by the Science
Palace, which had indeed been built on top of it.

Once it had firmly established its tyranny over the natives of the river
valley, the Brotherhood devoted itself to greed, lechery, sodomy, and
the worship of dark gods.

Adepts of the order claimed to have received secrets of sorcery known to
the Knights Templars, who'd learned them from infidel magicians in
Syria, the Levant, Jerusalem, and Egypt The Brotherhood had degenerated
from a military order to an occult secret society within a generation,
but persisted as such for centuries, holding hidden sway over the river
valleys in this part of northern alpine Europe, persisting until they
were destroyed root and branch by one of Napoleon's secret police
captains, a Bavarian spymaster named Krogh.

This underground chapel had been the scene of many dark and bloody rites
during the order's heyday, including human sacrifice and devil worship.
It was one of those darkly hallowed sites where mortals create their own
little corner of hell. Then one night, creatures who were not mortal had
come, vampires and demons, and the heretic knights bowed down to their
new gods and masters.

The rugged, rough-hewn stone table on which Marya's crimson coffin
rested had been a cult altar, its stones indelibly stained with the
blood of human sacrifices who'd screamed out their lives under the
ritual daggers of "holy"

executioners.

This was a place of power. Marya soaked up its unholy atmosphere, the
squalid streaming darkness of spirit that permeated the very atoms of
the place, warping them into something unclean.

Crossing the chamber on little slippered feet, she threw a hidden lever
in the ornate stone doorjamb, carved with demons and gargoyles and lewd
fornicating angels and devils. Somewhere in a hollow space behind the
walls, counterweights thudded into place and levers tripped and the
massive solid iron door of the chamber swung outward and open.

She could have turned herself into mist and floated out, but such
transformations were major energy-eaters.

Best to hold such power in reserve, for when it was needed. Beyond the
crypt, whose slab door now eased back into place, lay a warren of narrow
passages honeycombing an ancient stratum below the Science Palace, one
whose existence was known only to a handful of the chosen few.

Like a glimmering fancy flitting through the corridors of a mad mind,
Marya glided swiftly and surely through the black unlit corridors,
making her way to the more well-traveled channels in the upper
sublevels.

Through a secret door, she entered a private chamber, a land of dressing
room, a secluded, intimate space with pearly-white walls and elegant
accoutrements. Marya rang the servants' bell. Almost instantly, a
maidservant entered from the outside corridor, into the anteroom to
Marya's chamber. Hie vampire remained behind her closed inner door as
the servant placed a tray and goblet down on a serving table, and
exited.

Marya didn't like her followers to see her before she'd had time to
break her fast and make herself look presentable.

So she had invented this semiritualistic prelude to what was an
important and necessary act of feeding.

When the servant was gone, Marya went into the anteroom, where the
goblet waited. It was a golden goblet, carved for one of the Borgias.

It was warm to the touch, a detail much appreciated by cold-blooded
creatures such as herself. She lifted the lid. The goblet was filled
with fresh-drawn blood, so fresh that it hadn't yet begun to congeal and
was hot, steaming, and savory. A permanent pool of unwilling but juicily
vibrant blood donors was kept in one of the more restricted underground
areas, where the holding pens were.

When she took her main meal, preferably at the height of the night, at
midnight, she'd take it the old-fashioned way, direct from the jugular
vein of her latest young and strong victim. Sometimes the "donor" was a
young man, sometimes a young woman, according to her whims. She liked to
keep them alive for a few nights running, to develop and enjoy a more
personal relationship. She rarely finished off one of her playthings in
one feeding, except on rare occasions when she was either very hungry,
greedy, bloody-minded, or bored.

But for now, when she was freshly risen from the stuporous steep of
not-death, she liked a little pick-me-up, for quick energy and to dull
for a short time the keen edge of the forever hunger that consumed her.

Thirsting, she took hold of the goblet in both hands, lifting it to her
mouth, her throat working. For an instant the frozen-faced mask of jaded
sophistication that she constantly affected was replaced by a
deep-lined, fang baring grimace of avid thirsty need.

She drank deeply, greedily, of the hot, fresh blood.

When she set down the goblet, it was drained, empty.

Her eyes grew glazed and shining below heavy lids, the lines in her face
easing out, softening. She shivered, a sensual frisson of delight, as
nourishing liquid warmth exploded in the pit of her stomach, threading
her icy veins with blissful heat, life. Somebody else's life. Not hers,
she didn't have any, except what she stole.

A physical change was now precipitated.

Her hair lost its wiry stiffness and became supple and glossy black; her
skin lost its grainy sallow texture and became clean, flawless,
inhumanly marble-white; her eyes glowed and her lips ripened, glistening
with the red stuff.

Her limbs lost their stiffness, becoming supple, flexible, with a
ballerina's lissome grace.

Her face and body no longer resembled that of an ancient, sexless elf,
but of a bewitching, alluring child woman.

Now she was ready to go forth and meet the night.

Such "grazing" was useful from a command viewpoint, allowing optimum use
of her human slaves and chattels.

Especially with some of the higher-level brain workers, bureaucrats and
administrators, whose delicate thinking mechanisms were liable to become
upset if they were in her vicinity when the hunger was on her. She
couldn't mute the vibes of bloodlust and imminent predation that wafted
off her like pheromones when she was in such a state. It tended to rile
and unnerve the human cattle that were corralled into her domestic
service. An early feeding dulled the razor's edge of raw hunger that
even the dullest and most clodlike human clay seemed to be able to sense
and fear.

Now she was ready to dress. This elegant windowless boudoir had
wall-length sliding-door closets filled with clothes, and hulking
antique dark wood bureaus sniffed with expensive lingerie and
undergarments. A single closet was dedicated to footwear, containing
scores of pairs of shoes, sandals, slippers, and boots. There were
rackfuls of dresses and outfits wrought by the world's leading designers
and couture houses. There was a vanity table covered with cosmetics,
featuring lots of perfumes, colognes, scented waters, and the like.

Marya didn't use much makeup. When she was charged up at full vampiric
power, she needed no cosmetic enhancement, possessing the vampire's
seductive glamour.

When she was not at her best, as for example when going too long between
feedings, she relied on her powers of hypnotic fascination to beguile
and deceive the eyes of the mortals who surrounded her.

Personally, she disliked perfumes, because even the subtlest of them
smelted raw and reeking to her hyper keen senses, but they were often
useful to one of her kind, especially after she'd feasted on fresh
blood, to mask the raw animal reek of it that seemed to emanate from her
pores.

Unlike just about every other dressing room in the known world, this one
bore witness to a significant omission.

There were no minors.

Long, long experience had enabled Mary a to dress flawlessly without
them.

Now she shucked off her wrapperlike white coffin dress, baring a smooth,
slim, sylphlike body, with high firm breasts and subtly rounded curves.
Her pointy nipples were dark red, her skin was bone-white.

She dressed quickly. This was a vitally important night, critical. She
must be up and about. She was in a martial mood and dressed accordingly,
selecting a military-style burgundy tunic with gold frogging and
epaulets, and dark black loose-fitting baggy pants, tucked into the tops
of soft black leather ankle boots.

Marya, tingling with ecstatic little thrills of energy from the fresh
blood, blanked her mind, concentrating on expanding her awareness
outward. She did not need to be physically out of doors to perceive the
environment.

A creature that spends half its existence sealed up in a coffin against
the light of day learns how to extend and enhance its sensory
perception.

Walls and floors and rocks and dirt now became insubstantial to her
awarness, wavering, becoming translucent, thinning into phantomlike
double exposures of themselves.

Outside, darkness gathered, thickening, blacker than the waters of Lake
Lorelei and the the River Undine, twisting and threading through the
Frankenthal Valley to finally join a tributary of the Danube.

Marya began with a quick inspection tour of her domain.

Belowground, there were sublevels devoted to labs and scientific
experiments. There were detention areas, stocked with male and female
captives and slaves, kept penned and on tap as a steady source of
subjects for ex perimentation, food, sacrifice, or sexual perversion.
The categories were not mutually exclusive and a luckless captive could
work out the entire series before his or her corpse was fed to the
dissection tables, organ banks, and ultimately the biodegradable
recycling vats.

In an area where the medical/surgical and detention wings overlapped
stood a row of cells holding the subjects of previous or imminent
surgical experimentation.

The rooms combined the functions of a detention cell and an
intensive-care ward, and were located in an annex of the medical wing,
on a corridor radiating out from the hemispherically shaped White Room
at the hub of the level's center.

Outside one of the cells, Marya conferred with a medical attendant.

He said, "They tell me he was found early this morning, unconscious,
curled up in a culvert, after spending a night wearing nothing but his
pajama bottoms to protect him against the elements, the subfreezing
temperatures, and icy winds. By all rights, he should be lying hi an
oxygen tent, half-dead from shock, exposure, and exhaustion.

"Instead, except for some superfical cuts and bruises, he's in excellent
physical condition. His heartbeat is strong, regular--an athlete's
heart! If he wasn't under restraint, I have no doubt that he'd be up and
walking around.

"That is not to say anything about his mental condition, but of course
that's not my field."

The door was unsealed, closing behind Marya as she entered the
medical/detention chamber. Glendon lay on his back on a bed, wearing a
green patient's hospital smock, hands at his sides, wrists cuffed to
thick canvas restraining straps on the bed.

Physically, he seemed well, apart from the sick, haunted; look on his
face, which didn't take a turn for the better; when Marya entered. She
stood at his bedside, looking down at him. She said, "Good evening,
Professor Glen don. You're looking well tonight, considering."

"You, too."

"So glad you feel comfortable enough about your situation to joke about
it."

"Comfortable isn't exactly the word I'd use," he said, rattling his
restraint cuffs against the straps fastening them to the bed's tubular
frame. "By the way, what is my situation?"

She said, "Enviable, from the looks of things. Such a busy night, and
you seem no worse than a man suffering from a hangover."

He said, scowling, "What would you know about hangovers-'"

"Who better? I've gone on a few bulges myself."

"Yes, I know. Blood binges."

She frowned her displeasure. "Don't be crude."

"Pardon me! I'd hate to offend your tender sensibilities."

"Why be rude, when I'm trying to be nice?" she added.

"That's what worries me. Why are you trying, so uncharacteristically, to
be nice?"

"Is that all? I should think you'd have more vexing concerns. You know,
you're really the most difficult of all my guests."

" ',' she calls it." He rolled his eyes.

"Please don't be quarrelsome. Here, I'll show you my good faith."

She freed him from the bed restraints. Open cuffs fell away as he raised
his hands, rubbing his wrists, looking warily at. her.

He said, "Not afraid of the big bad werewolf?"

"Hardly." She smiled, not pleasantly. "Besides, you're not him. You're
just Glendon now. In your mortal form, you're no more a threat to me
than any other mere human. I could toss you around like a rag doll."

"Why don't you?"

"You're very important to me, Glendon. You're beyond the human herd.
They're your prey now. And that's a good thing. That's what they're
there for, so ordained by Satan in the unnatural order of things, the
same darkness-alive that made you what you are."

He swung his legs off the bed, putting his feet on the floor, rising.
His knees buckled and his hand shot out, gripping uie metal-tube rail of
the headrest to steady himself.

Then the spell passed, a little color came creeping back into his
cheeks, and his gaze once more became sharp, focused.

"Are you all right, Glendon?"

"Tip-top. Just got up too fast, that's all. An instant's dizziness."

"I'm not surprised you're a bit weak, not after your big night last
night. Who wouldn't be tired after a nocturnal orgy of arson, mayhem,
murder, and cannibalism?

But you seem to be bearing up well enough.

"So revealing to finally discover the truth about oneself, eh,
Professor?" He said, evenly enough, "That thing inside my skin is
supposed to be my true self?"

"After last night, can you doubt it? Deep down inside, all men are
beasts. You're lucky enough to be gifted witi a latent superbeast." He
said calmly, "What makes him any more real than | me, Glendon? Perhaps
we're both equally unreal, the man| in the beast and the beast in the
man."

Marya laughed, but there was a hollowness to the sound, an unsureness.
And that was a rare thing. "I'm; afraid that's too abstract for me, but
then I don't take the pleasure in windy words that you academics do."

"Too bloodless for you, eh, Countess?"

She stared at him.

"You look surprised, Marya."

"I am--by your attitude."

"How so?"

"I thought you'd be taking this so much harder, with more anger, more
shock, I don't know. More emotionally."

"I'm a scientist, remember? A fact is a fact, not something that can be
rationalized away or a cause for emotion."

"I must say, you're the most cold-blooded werewolf I've ever met!"

Glendon circled her, walking around, getting the feel of his feet under
him. Looking past her, he eyed the door at the opposite end of the room.

Marya said, "It's not locked."

"Almighty sure of yourself, aren't you?"

"Yes. And of you. The scientist in you won't rest until the last secrets
have been revealed."

"Perhaps there's some truth in what you say, Countess.

But even the devil can quote scripture."

"More words. I'll give you truths, Glendon. But first get dressed. There
are some clothes in the closet Shirt, pants, what you need. They've been
matched to your measurements.

Put them on."

He stood around, restless, impatient. She said, "Well?

What are you waiting for?"

"You're going to watch? Aren't you going to leave?"

She smirked. "Now whose sensibilities are tender? I've seen you change
into a werewolf, what more is there to seet'

"Perhaps that's what makes me want to protect whatever privacy remains
to me."

"Fine," she said, turning her back on him and crossing to the door. When
she was almost out in the hallway, she thought better of it, checked,
turned, and went back to him.

"One more thing you should be aware of, Glendon."

"Only one?"

"This may be the most important for you. Outside, it's night. But you
know that without having to be told, know it as I do. Now, why would a
werewolf be allowed to go into our lair at night?

"Because the last night of the full moon was last night.

Only the light of the full moon can turn you into a werewolf.

The moonlight stimulates the body chemistry to begin the transformation
process, triggering the neurotransmitters that change man to beast. But
you know that, you're a scientist."

"The point being ... T "That for the next thirty days, until the next
full moon, you're just an ordinary man. So be wise and check your
aggressive and heroic impulses. You won't have the powers of the beast
to bless you. Pain hurts and an injury now can do you serious, perhaps
even fatal, damage."

"Is that so bad?"

"Don't fool yourself, you're certainly not fooling me.

You're not the suicidal type, Glendon. Besides, even if \ you did
succeed in dying--and even latent werewolves are very hard to kill--why,
as soon as the light of the next full moon shone on you, or your grave,
you'd become a werewolf once again."

"So that's how it works, eh?"

She nodded. "There's no escaping one's destiny."

Glendon shrugged. "Whatever lycanthropy is, it's beyond pure science.
There's something diabolical in it."

"So learned your grandfather, Glendon the first; and your father; and
all the victims who died screaming under their fangs and claws.

"By the way," she added, too casual, "here's a little something that I
owe you."

Cat-quick, she slashed him with her talons, raking his left cheek and
chest. Sharp burning lines flared where the nasty gouges cut into flesh.
Four parallel red slashes scourged his left cheek and ran diagonally
across his chest muscles.

Marya's face was gleeful, gloating, as alive as an Un dead face can ever
get. She held out her hand in front of her and looked at it, head
tilted, as if she'd just had her nails painted, as in a sense she'd had.
Blood droplets clung to the nails' curving, arrowhead tips.

She longed, burned, to lap up those steaming droplets.

But she dared not. Werewolf blood was rare, rich, and dangerous. To
drink it, to taste even a few drops of it, could have unexpected and
dangerous occult consequences, prematurely establishing a link between
him and her, between his destiny and hers.

With all that was brewing in tonight's hell's cauldron, it would be best
for her not to divide her forces and focus by linking with the werewolf
before she'd established total dominance over him.

Last night's debacle had proved that.

Keeping her wrist loose, Marya gave her hand a sharp shake, whipping it
clean of the blood droplets. "That's partial payback for your daring to
attack me last night.

I'm going to put some considerable time, thought, and effort into paying
you back fully in the nights to come for that mad insolence."

Glendon was unimpressed. "According to you, in thirty days, I'll be a
werewolf again. Keep that in mind in case you're tempted to go too far."

She laughed scornfully. "Before the next full moon, you'll be my
worshipful, obedient pup."

Glendon lifted a hand, idly touching the wounded area on his cheek.
"Didn't miss the eye by much."

"If I'd wanted the eye, I would have taken it," she said. "I never miss
and I never do things by accident.

"I think we understand each other better now."

She turned, crossed to the door, opening it. "I told you it was
unlocked. But where could you go? Outside, in Visaria, you're wanted for
almost a dozen mutilation murders."

"Padding the total, aren't you? I seem to remember that it was a lot
fewer than that."

She shrugged. "Maybe we got rid of some people we'd been wanting to get
rid of, and you were a convenient peg to hang it on. What of it? You
gave everybody enough trouble last night to justify the effort.

"The fact of it is, Mr. Scientist, that outside of this nest you're the
most wanted man in the country, with orders to the police and auxiliary
search parties to shoot on sight. The airport, railroad, every road and
bicycle path and hiking trail, they're all covered. There's no way out,
no escape.

"So get dressed and come take your place as you witness history--a
history which you will have helped make."

Presently, Marya emerged topside as the elevator car halted with a
slight jounce, giving a jaunty spring to her step as she strode through
the opening of a sliding door panel, which closed behind her.

She now stood in a secluded alcove, shielded by tall bookcases and bulky
wall abutments. Behind her, the sliding panel finished noiselessly
sealing shut, fitting so precisely into the rest of the wall that not
even the slightest crack betrayed the presence of the hidden elevator,
connecting with the lower levels.

Stepping out from behind the bookcases, she found herself in a big room
on the Science Palace's ground floor, a room with a southern exposure.

The Science Palace was officially closed to the public and all other
unauthorized personnel well before dark, clearing the halls and cabinet
offices of visitors and workers.

Now, except for the guards, the ground floor was largely empty of
people.

This room was wide, lofty, sometimes used as a hall for receptions and
similar formal and/or ceremonial occasions.

The tall south wall was set with a row of high, narrow windows with
pointed arches on the top, opening onto a view of terraced garden
grounds and pavilions descending to the lakeside area. Beyond lay the
broad black obsidian surface of the lake, reaching out to its far shore,
where dark and distant foothills sloped to a jagged range of mountain
peaks in the south.

For now, all was right with Marya's dark world. The moon-ray-projector
tests had been a success, and the device was fully operational and ready
for its first major test. Werewolf Glendon had been retrieved and was
now safely on a leash. Her agents in Isla Morgana had successfully
captured Dracula and Frankenstein, and now were only hours--no, minutes
away from delivering them to her.

The lake surface had been flat calm, but when Marya made her entrance
aboveground, the waters became ruffled, skimmed by cold winds that
suddenly blew down from the mountains, across the lake.

Gusts of winds buffeted the windows, rattling them in their frames. In
the distance, the mountain peaks were hazed, obscured by what looked
like a long horizontal wad of scruffy steel wool.

It was very late in the winter, but it looked like a midseason storm was
brewing. So much the better; she wouldn't have to expend her energies
using sorcery to conjure one up. Even nature bowed to her.

Exultant, she cried, "The elements conspire along with me, at the
creation of the coming race!"

In the distance, droning away somewhere in the heights, sounded the
ever-increasing buzz of an approaching aircraft.

Night flight.

Visaria bound, the jet plane punched through endless reaches of icy
black. Above, a vault of stars like bright tiny ice chips; below, thin
colorless streamers of clouds and the great hulking curve of the earth
in darkness.

Inside, in the passenger compartment, Jax Breen was swearing feelingly.
"Damn that delay for refueling!"

Kearny, drinking a green-bottled beer, paused long enough to speak.
"What do you want the pilot to do? Run out of gas in midair so we can
fall out of the sky, crash, and bum?

Julie Evans said, "Pleasant thought!"

"Come to think of it, if we did crash, the only ones who'd survive are
those two back there." Kearny jerked a thumb in the direction of the
rear cargo compartment Its bulkhead door now stood open, golden-orange
light and warmth radiating out of it, as if the rounded doorway opened
onto the light of day.

Breen was irked and couldn't let it go. "The refueling wouldn't have
been a problem, if only the flight had been on time!

"I thought that when you fly to Europe, you've got the jet stream
working for you, giving you a boost along the way. So what happened? How
come we ran over an hour behind scheduler'

Julie said, "Crosswinds, according to the pilot They tried to blow us
off course, causing the plane to use more fuel just to stay in place.
That cost us flight time and fuel."

"Sure, what else's he going to say? Of course he'll hang it on the
crosswinds, that way he's covered." Breen reached for a cup of coffee,
making a face when he sipped it.

"Tikes! It's cold!"

Kearny said, "It was no good hot"

"How would you know? You haven't been without a beer since we've been
airborne." Breen reached into a breast pocket, fishing out a vial of
pills. He shook two into his palm, tossed them back, and gulped them
down with a swig of cold coffee. After a pause he made a face,
shuddering.

Julie Evans glanced up from the magazine she'd been idly leafing
through. "Easy does it with the happy pills, Jax."

"I need the energy."

"You've been eating them like candy all during the flight."

"You're nagging." "Am I? So sorry," she said, not sounding sorry at all.

Breen turned to Dorian, who sat by herself, face held close to a window,
trying to see past the compartment's backlit reflections into the night
sky.

Breen said, "What about you?"

She turned, facing him. "What?"

"What goes on? You've been sitting there for most of the flight, talking
to yourself. I know, I've been watching you, I saw your lips move."

Julie Evans snickered. "Maybe she's been praying."

Dorian said, "Not likely." "Listen," Breen said seriously, "if I catch
you trying to do magic, or cast spells, or cloud men's minds, or any of
that shit, I'm not going to take any chances with you, I'm just going to
throw you out of the airplane door."

"Surely you're not afraid of a little talent like mine, not when you've
mastered the mighty Dracula himself?"

Breen leaned toward her. "What do you get from Dracula right now?"

"Nothing. Linking up mind to mind with Dracula is the last thing on my
mind. Or any other sane mind."

"Don't talk to me about sanity, Dorian. Not the man who bagged Dracula
and Frankenstein." Julie Evans said, "Why bother to waste time on her,
Jax?"

"It's no waste. She's a sensitive. She picks up things, like a human
radio receiver."

Julie sneered. "It's when she starts broadcasting that you'd better
worry." Breen  the point, not letting it go. "Even with your mind closed
off, there must be something you're picking up from Dracula?"

Dorian said, "There's a kind of--pressure. I'm keeping it at just that"

"But he's awake?"

"Oh yes, he's awake. He's been awake since we flew into darkness and it
was night."

"So he's awake, and aware of us? Knows we're here?"

"Vampires can smell live blood a long way off." Kearny said, "I'm
camouflaging mine with alcohol." Julie Evans said, "Fielding it, more
Ukely."

Breen rose, starting aft. Julie sighed, saying, "What, again?" Kearny
said, "What're you doing, you keep going to the can or something back
there? Which reminds me ..."

Belching, he rose, starting up the aisle in the opposite direction of
Breen, lumbering forward to the lavatory.

Breen made his way to the rear compartment His eyes were bloodshot and
his face was drawn and haggard, wizened.

He broke a furious sweat as he neared the radiant open doorway.

There were two sentries on duty. They were both posted to the
compartment, to watch its strange cargo, but it was so hot that they
took turns, alternating every five or ten minutes.

One guard stayed inside while the other stood outside the space, looking
in through the open door.

Both wore those protective wraparound dark plastic eye visors. Breen
donned his, banding his pulsing red eyes with cool dark black-green
curved plastic lenses.

Going around the first guard, Breen stepped through the portal, into the
cargo compartment Thanks to the banks of sunlamps, the space was hot and
bright, too hot and too bright The direct UV rays fell only on the
coffin in the corner, but their accummulated heat turned the compartment
into a sweatbox.

The guard inside was sitting down, with his shirt unbuttoned to his
chest and his sleeves rolled up past the elbows.

His weapon lay across the tops of his thighs. His head hung down between
slumped shoulders, his eyes were drowsy looking, and his mouth gaped
open, panting.

He glanced at Breen, nodding at him. Breen said, "Damn, it's hot in
here." The guard barely mustered up the energy to grunt, his attitude
suggesting that such a foolish comment deserved no better reply.

Breen stood near the doorway, staring at Dracula's coffin, bathed in
artificial sunlight, wrapped with chains. >

Something tickled his nostrils and under the visor he frowned, sniffing
the air. He realized what he'd smelled was the pungent chemical scent of
the clear plastic block now encasing Frankenstein.

The chemical scent had always been there, sharp and distinctive, but
this new element was different. It was lighter, stronger, more acidic.

Fumes.

Breen stepped toward the monolith block, head thrust forward, staring.
The block seemed to be surrounded by a misty, wavering outline. Was it
an illusion, caused by the curvature of the dark plastic lenses? Or was
it something else?

Breen turned his back on the sunlamps, lifting the visor to take a quick
peek at the block, squinting at it to protect his eyes from the light.

With a start, he realized that the flickering, ghostly outline he'd
seen, boiling around the edges of the slab like a milky corona, could
just as easily be seen with the visor off.

Visor once again on, he went to the block, scrutinizing it Breen shoved
his face close to the block's surface, sniffing.

"The fumes seem to be getting stronger, but it's hard to tell for sure."

The guard, who'd previously been watching nun with dull stupefaction,
now showed a flicker of interest. "So?"

Holding one hand in front of him palm out, with fingers spread, Breen
reached for the slab block opposite him, placing his hand against the
smooth flat surface behind which shimmered the obscure hulk of the giant
monster.

Breen said, wonderingly, "It's warm ...!"

When he took his hand away, its outline was imprinted a quarter-inch
deep on the block face.

Breen gasped. Hie guard said, more peevishly than alarmed, "What?"

"The block--it's softening!

"That explains why the fumes are getting thicker. It's the heat from
those blasted sunlamps. It's so hot that it's raised the temperature of
the block, melting it!" The guard said, "Looks pretty solid to me"

"How close do you want to cut it? Not to mention that breathing too much
of this shit can't be healthy," Breen said.

He turned to Dracula's coffin and started switching off some of the
sunlamps by hand, darkening every other lamp clustered on the metal
support trees.

The other guard, the one outside, stuck his head into the compartment.
"What're you doing?"

Breen said, "Shutting down some of the sunlamps. It's so hot in here
that the plastic block holding Frankenstein is getting soft--melting!"

The guard outside whispered, "My God!"

From behind nun, in the passenger compartment, Julie Evans called,
"Don't make things any worse by calling on the competition!"

The temperature dropped immediately with each lamp that Breen switched
off. Even with the ventilator-system duct fans going full blast, the
compartment was heavy with heat and chemical fumes.

When Breen stepped out into the aisle for a moment, he noticed that his
garments were soaked through with sweat.

Over intercom speakers came the pilot's message to the passengers.
"Visaria is straight ahead. We'll be coming in for a landing in a few
minutes. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts."

Kearny said, "That bastard up in the cockpit wouldn't sound so smug if
he was back here!" Julie said, "We'll be on the ground in about ten
minutes, tops. That'll be long before the cube melts. Why, it hasn't
even started to liquefy yet; it's not hot enough for that, it's only
softening up.

"So let's just stay loose and not do anything stupid." Kearny said,
"Sure, it'd take hours for it to melt down, and it's not even puddling
yet." Breen said, "It doesn't have to turn into a puddle. The softening
will put strains into the block, making it unstable --"

Kearny said, "Here's an idea. Why not spray the block with CO2 foam from
the fire extinguishers? That'll cool it off."

"A stupid idea," Breen said. "Sure, and splash potentially lethal
conductive fluids all around a compartment loaded with electric lights,
cables, and generators.

"Do me a favor. If you get any more bright ideas like that, keep them to
yourself."

"Just trying to help, Jax."

"Shut up and let me think."

The plane hit a rough patch, shaking and juddering. The pilot's voice
sounded over the intercom. "Whoops, looks like we'll be experiencing
some turbulence coming in for a landing, as there's a storm blowing down
from the moun tains. But we're well ahead of it, and will be safely on
the pound before it reaches the city."

Snowy jagged peaks thrust up below, from the darkling earth. Nestled on
a broad flat plateau below the foothills of the northern Alps was the
Frankenthal, the Undine River winding through it, taking its source in
the oval black mirror of Lake Lorelei.

The plane made a slight banking turn, tilting the cabin body to one
side, so the row of porthole windows suddenly opened onto a view of
Visaria.

The valley glowed with hard bright city lights, the multicolored lines
and squares of brightness diagramming the paths of the power grids.

Kearny said, "Better sit down and fasten your seat belt like the man
said, Jax."

"Like hell. I'm staying right here by the compartment door so I can stay
on top of things," Breen said.

He told the guards, "That goes for you, too. Never mind mat we're
landing. Stay where you are."

The plane's nose dipped, pointing downward, beginning its final descent
Below, the landing strip waited, an asphalt ribbon beaded on both sides
by regularly spaced blazing beacons.

Pressure changes caused ears to pop in the jet Kearny said, "Just a
couple of minutes till touchdown.

We've got it made." Breen said sourly, "Start patting yourself on the
back when we're on solid ground."

As the plane made its final'approach to the small, neat airport with its
modernistic terminal building, somebody said, "Almost there ..."

In his coffin, sensing the nearness of Visaria, Dracula's red rage
reached new heights.

It had begun back in Isla Morgana, with dawn nearing, when he had
returned to the crypt under Seaguard Castle to take to his coffin-bed,
only to find Frankenstein waiting for him. A deadly surprise, since the
last time Dracula had seen him, the monster was seemingly destroyed.

Dracula wanted to be rid of the creature, but at that time had not yet
been able to properly dispose of it, as he surely should have done. He
himself had returned after being taken for dead too many times not to
expect the same of other unearthly beings.

And Frankenstein was unearthly. The cosmic rays with which he'd been
energized at his creation had transformed him down to the atomic level,
making him a superhuman engine of destruction.

But a very stupid engine, with a dim, feeble, flickering consciousness
that Dracula had easily been able to dominate in the past, rendering the
monster the perfectly obedient mindless slave.

That was before Frankenstein had been resurrected by the power of black
magic and voodoo, empowered by the lightning bolts of demonic
elementals. The result was catastrophic, at least as far as Dracula was
concerned. The newly reanimated Frankenstein was a devil incarnate, an
embodiment of vengeance. Even with his vaunted hypnotic powers, Dracula
could not reestablish his sway over the monster, his mental control.

Before, Frankenstein's mind, such as it was, was muddy thinking,
sluggish, formless clay to be easily shaped by Dracula's will. Now,
though, it was like fire, and Dracula could no more dominate it than he
could grasp fire.

And the fire that blazed in Frankenstein was an all consuming lust for
the complete and total annihilation of his former lord and master,
Dracula.

For the aristocratic vampire lord, with his grotesque fantasies of
predestined mastery over all lesser beings, this was, hi a sense, the
ultimate peasant revolt. Frankenstein was beyond all reason. There was
something almost demonic in his single-minded pursuit of revenge against
Dracula.

Indeed, Dracula had begun to wonder if perhaps some demonic spirit might
not have crossed over from the other side when Uncle Basil performed his
forbidden ceremony of drawing down the lightning so that the monster
could walk again. Some hateful ghost or phantasm, which had possessed
the monster's brute form and made it its own.

But if that were so, then why did it so relentlessly dog Dracula?
Because enough of Frankenstein's ego, his animating consciousness,
remained to seek vengeance? Or because the demonic usuper knew that as
the supreme supernatural force of the Dark World, Dracula was the foe it
had to beat?

Dracula swore to himself that he would find the answer to this question.

But first he had to break out of this trap that his enemies had laid for
him. And a cunning trap it was, too. It had two parts, one spiritual,
the other scientific, both equally potent.

The cross placed in his coffin by a true believer had done its work
well. That the martyr had in a very real sense died for his faith
potentiated the binding holy power of the symbol. There was something
bright and pure and clean about it that burned like a laser beam through
the miasma of darkness, corruption, and filth that was Dracula, utterly
paralyzing him.

He'd gone into a kind of catatonic trance, unable to move by so much as
a twitch. It was far worse than the comalike sleep into which he
normally lapsed by day, for in that state, at least his mind was free,
allowing his abnormally heightened perception to roam among the
graveyards and grounds around him.

But this imprisonment, bound by the cross, froze him mentally, too,
pinning his awareness to the confines of his skull just as thoroughly as
the cross had pinned his body to his coffin.

It was like being a live brain trapped in a dead body.

And Dracula wasn't a great one for introspection at any time.

This was no mere passive punishment, freezing him into immobility. It
was active torment, for the touch of the holy object on his undead flesh
was like a shovelful of hot coals.

Almost as worrisome was his vulnerability. Enough of his hyperkeen
senses remained. for him to hear and sense what was going on around his
box. How he'd impotently raged when his captors had dared to use him as
bait to lure Frankenstein into their trap. He, Dracula, bait!

What an intolerable insult!

What agony, having to lie rigid in the coffin, unable to move, to defend
himself, as Frankenstein stalked inexorably forward. No one had been
more surprised than Dracula when the tiger-pit plan had worked.

But, as Jax Breen had feared and Dracula had hoped, the binding spell of
the martyr's cross had been a localized phenomenon, losing much of its
force as soon as the plane lifted off from the Isla Morgana runway,
breaking the physical contact with the island that potentiated its
sacred power. The force dwindled increasingly as the plane distanced
itself from the island.

Outside the plane, then, of course, it was broad daylight, so Dracula
was still effectively pinned to his coffin.

And the presence of the cross itself still caused a major disruption of
his consciousness and will. But his awareness increased, allowing him to
sense what was going on around him.

When the plane finally flew into darkness, Dracula knew.

Beyond the coffin, beyond the thin metal-tube shell of the plane that
stood between him and emptiness, the still-bright skies boomed with the
vibrations of oncoming night. Earth rolled into shadow, sweeping night's
leading edge, the terminating line, across the face of half the globe.
The plane raced to meet it.

Well in advance of the plane's crossing the shadow barrier, Dracula's
captors switched on the sunlamps, bathing his coffin in billowing waves
of deadly UV light. It was as if he cowered in the shelter of a lead
coffin amid the streaming radioactive rays of an atomic reactor.

A deadly trap, but not foolproof.

Finally the plane left the last of the light behind, flying into night.
As darkness enfolded the aircraft, Dracula felt as if he'd been plugged
into a power source, lifting his spirits. The binding spell having long
since become exhausted, his paralysis was gone and he had freedom of
movement inside his coffin.

Alas, the cross was still imprisoned with him. For him, it was like a
normal man being boxed up with a red-hot rivet tossed hi to keep him
occupied. A red-hot rivet that would never cool, not while it was in
contact with his person.

By dint of various covert squirmings and contortions, Dracula managed to
inch the sacred object off his chest, where it had fallen down his side,
wedging into a fold of the coffin lining, and breaking its connection
with his un dead flesh.

Immediate relief followed, as though someone had ceased working on his
nerves with a branding iron.

Minutes passed while the plane plowed into the deepening darkness of the
night sky, going from star-spangled purple blue to velvet black. The
sunlamps steadily raised the heat of the compartment. Minus the searing
light of UV rays, the heat alone was meaningless to Dracula, who ignored
it

What he could not ignore was his perception of the inexorable quickening
of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein was dormant, although when Dracula reached out with a
sensitive mind probe, the tightest feathery touch, he touched a fiery
magmalike center in the monster's mind, buried under layers of nullity
and inertia. At the core of Frankenstein's being was a fiery, pulsing
core of awareness, potent, coiling, and dangerous.

Dracula quickly withdrew his mind touch, breaking the connection,
fearing to probe deeper for fear of hastening the monster's awakening.

Because it already was awakening. Temperature changes, microscopic
variations in the structure of the plastiglas block, now allowed stimuli
from outside to impinge on Frankenstein's sense receptors.

Ironically, the main motive power of the quickening was the UV rays from
the sunlamps, which touched the monster's skin, triggering the metabolic
processes of renewal and revival.

This modem world!

That was what came of relying on technological wizardry rather than
"real" wizardry, magical wizardry.

There were other powers in the world beyond those of science and logic,
powers that long predated them. Such was the sorcerous power of Visaria,
citadel of black magic.

It was like a giant lodestone of sorcery, a battery of dark side power,
crackling with a storehouse of negative energies amassed over centuries.

Each minute of flight cut the miles between the plane and Visaria,
feeding Dracula like a stream of pure oxygen feeds a blowtorch. He could
feel himself getting stronger.

Proving that he was not entirely witless, Breen had discovered that the
sunlamps' heat was softening up the plastic block encasing Frankenstein.
This Breen had lately proved to be a particularly irritating thorn in
Dracula's side, and the vampire lord had marked him out for special
attention on some near-future day of reckoning.

Breen had shut down some of the sunlamps, lessening the suffocating
pressure on Dracula.

The plane began its descent. He had arrived. Visaria lay below. Time now
for him to make his move while they were still in midair. On the ground,
reinforcements were sure to be waiting.

Besides, one should enter a city in style, not as prisoner but as
conqueror. He was Dracula!

Those hateful little suns were arrayed against him, streaming out their
lethal rays. Inside, Dracula tried his strength against the coffin,
straining it at the seams, probing for weak points, loosening the
joints. The sides and lids creaked, rattling the chains.

Now the coffin began to shake, quaking from within.

The inside guard started. The outside man stuck his head through the
doorway to see what was happening.

The coffin vibrated. Those who couldn't see it heard it.

The coffin rattled against its chains, bumping against the trestle table
to which it was secured. Hung on independent clamp-on metal trees, the
sunlamps were immune to the shaking.

The plane tilted downward, gliding toward the runway.

Breen shoved past the outside guard to enter the compartment, where he
grabbed up a four-foot-long sharpened wooden stake, holding it ready.

Hoisting the stake in both hands, point down, facing the coffin, he
said, "We can finish this the old-fashioned way, with a stake through
the heart!"

In the coffin, Dracula braced himself, his limbs flexing, as he
positioned his palms and bent knees against the underside of the lid.

With every ounce of maniacal fury and strength available to him, he
suddenly exploded outward.

Locks broke, hinges tore loose from their screws, and the chains
tautened, suddenly snapping under the outward bulging force.

With one swift move, Dracula got his feet under him in the coffin, while
he gripped the lid with both hands, holding it over himself as a shield
to screen the worst of the sunlamps' destructive UV rays.

Their poison light seared his exposed skin, even sleeting through his
garments, stabbing hot needles into his pores. But the coffin lid
shielded him from the worst of it, screening his head and shoulders.

Where his exposed fingers gripped the top of the lid, they sizzled tike
bacon on a griddle.

Breaking open the coffin, lifting the lid, and rising to his feet in the
coffin had taken Dracula less than a heartbeat Somebody else's, since he
didn't have one.

But he was fast Before Breen or the guards could react, Dracula used the
coffin lid as a battering ram, smashing the arrayed UV lamps beaming
down on him.

Light racks crumpled, lenses and bulbs exploding in showers of glass and
sparks.

The first wide-swung arc knocked out half of the lights, jostling others
so they shone off to the sides in random directions.

Dracula swung again, a whirling two-handed swipe that laid waste to the
back rows of the lights, the second tier of defense.

Still holding the lid over his head with both hands, Dracula leaped out
of the coffin, hurtling clear of what remained of the UV-lit area.

His face was peeling in strips of skin like a bad sunburn, his hands
were scorched claws, and scores of tiny lines of smoke streamed from his
flesh and garments, but he was free.

Free!

Tossing the lid aside, he scaled it across the compartment, knocking out
another row of sunlamps. Broken glass fell. Snapped cables spat
sputtering sparks.

Dracula seized a guard, one smoking clawlike hand clamped on the back of
the man's neck as he shoved his face hard against one of the sunlamps'
superheated metal dish reflectors.

Screams mingled with the hiss of bubbling flesh as the guard's face
melted against the metal, his shrieks dying swiftly into a liquid
gurgled mewling.

Dracula lifted him up, tilting his head back, exposing his ruined horror
of a face, then sank his fangs into the other's taut throat.

The vampire was thirsty. He'd been locked up in that coffin for a long
time without a bite.

He guzzled, gore spraying everywhere. Instant reserves of energy powered
up his body.

Holding the guard up in the air so his feet left the ground, Dracula
drank deep, swilling the raw hot ted blood that was his life.

When the guard's dangling feet stopped kicking, Dracula contemptuously
tossed him away.

The vampire now stood between Jax Breen and the compartment door.
Dracula's back-was to him as he tossed aside the dead guard, who
crumpled in a heap against the bulkhead wall, a bloody mess.

Breen thrust the stake at Dracula's back. Dracula whirled, half turning,
clapping a hand down on the stake, clutching it, checking its thrust,
and immobilizing it and its owner. His hand was a scorched, skeletal
claw, still sizzling.

Dracula effortlessly plucked the stake from the other's hands, tossing
it aside. Then he grabbed Breen, collaring him.

Dracula said, "You are a very clever young man. You might have lived to
be a very clever old man had you not crossed paths with Dracula." Breen
said, "Whatever you do to me, I'll know that you're done for, too! You
destroyed your own coffin, sealing your own fate! Without a bed of your
native soil to sleep on, you'll perish at the first light of day!"

"I'm afraid you have forgotten something, or perhaps you never knew it.
Marya is her father's daughter. Her native soil, too, is Transylvania.
She's sure to have many boxes of such earth secured in her citadel, and
not she or anyone else, living or dead, can stop me from claiming my
fair share.

"So you see, I will continue on, while it is you who will die."

"No, wait! Don't, please--"

Holding Breen by die scruff of the neck, Dracula hus tied him over to
the coffin, which now stood in cool shadows.

Dracula steeled himself, then plunged his free hand into the coffin,
fishing out the cross from where it had fallen between the lining.

Dracula said, fangs bared, "I believe you dropped this."

As soon as he touched it, the flesh of his hand started to sizzle. His
expression was that of a man who had plunged his arm up to the elbow
into a cauldron of boiling water.

He said, "I confess this is somewhat painful, but I heal quickly.
Besides, I had the opportunity to get used to it during the time you so
thoughtfully imprisoned me with it."

He closed his fist on the cross. Now, incredibly, it was the silver
cross that started to bubble and soften, melting.

It grew red-hot, white-hot.

By way of explanation, Dracula said, "We're in Visaria now."

Breen squawked, his cry choked off as Dracula squeezed his throat. The
vampire gritted his fanged face in a tiger mask. A death mask.

Dracula shoved his hand into Breen's gaping, disbelieving mouth,
distending it, shoving the now-molten metal of the cross down his throat
"Those who try to take a bite out of Dracula usually find me hard to
swallow, my friend."

Jax Breen's death agonies were awesome, spectacular.

Dracula regretted that he was unable to devote to them the full measure
of appreciation that they deserved, but he had things to do.

Among which was tending his damaged hand. The hand that had held the
cross was charred and smoking.

Gathering his cape around him, he exited the cargo compartment, stepping
through the doorway into the downward tilting aisle of the main cabin.

The cabin was a scene of pandemonium. Down at the opposite end, Julie
Evans, Kearny, and the other guard clustered against the bulkhead
separating them from the cockpit, battering on the door that those
inside had already locked. It was a solid door and they weren't making
much headway.

Dorian, too, stood down at the forward end of the cabin, apart from the
others, huddled in a corner to the side of the aisle. She didn't bother
to try hiding because there was no hiding from Dracula.

Dracula stalked down the aisle, eyes afire, fangs bared, face and front
smeared with fresh gore, one hand a charred and blackened claw, his
batwinged cape flowing and streaming behind him as if it were blown by
storm winds, when the air in the cabin was perfectly still.

He glided down the aisle. The other guard, the one who'd been outside
the cargo compartment, looked over his shoulder and saw Dracula coming
at him, reaching.

The guard grabbed Kearny with both hands and pitched him backward,
throwing him to the vampire in hopes it would slow him down.

Dracula took hold of Kearny with his one good hand, thrusting his maimed
and burned hand into Kearny's middle like a spear, ripping it open and
plunging the hand deep inside.

Like a sponge soaking up water, the hand soaked up Mood, swelling with
it, marvelously reknitting and rebuilding die scorched, seared flesh.
The hand began looking less like a claw and more like a hand, growing,
putting flesh on its skeletal phalanges.

Dracula also savored Kearny's death agonies, but mat was in the way of
being a bonus.

Easing his grip, he let Kearny fall flopping and twitching to the
carpeted floor.

Dracula eyed the other three. Hie guard and Julie Evans had stopped
their frantic efforts to break into the cockpit, and turned to face
Dracula. The guard, Julie, and Dorian all stood with their backs to the
wall, with the guard and Julie standing nearby and Dorian standing off
to one side.

Dracula's face and front were blood-drenched, glistening.

His newly repaired hand dripped blood. His hot breath stank of it.

While he paused, deciding whom he would attack first, the ground neared
as the plane came swooping in toward the runway, The guard tried to buy
himself some more instants of precious time by throwing Julie to
Dracula. Instead, she used some kind of tricky reverse judo move and
tripped him up, slinging him to Dracula.

Like he was brushing aside a piece of windblown newspaper, Dracula
grabbed the guard and tossed nun backward without looking, the hapless
man screaming as he went cartwheeling up the aisle before smashing into
some seats.

Dracula said, "Now I crave woman's blood."

The mask slipped, and for an instant his face twisted with horrible
inhuman appetites and thirsts, and he didn't look so very aristocratic.

Clamoring noise erupted in the aft cargo compartment, a violent ruckus.
There were loud cracking sounds, like a winter ice jam breaking up at
first thaw, followed by what sounded like a huge heaping mass of ice
cubes suddenly spilling to the floor.

It was the sound of the plastic cube disintegrating, shattered to bits
as Frankenstein came roaring back to full strength and consciousness.

The plane's tail shook with the impact, while the pilot had to do some
fancy flying to recover.

Below, the two-dimensional panoply of lights suddenly became a landscape
of three-dimensional buildings whose tops reached above the plane, now
gliding parallel to and near to touching down on the landing strip.

In a cramped sealed bay under the belly of the plane's fuselage, the
landing-gear apparatus began to unlimber, flexing with engorged
hydraulics and interlocking rods and struts.

The bay doors opened, streaming air shrieking below, the runway a blur
as the struts and wheels unfolded from the plane's underside.

Above, solidly nestled in a cramped cradle of metal beams and cross
braces, Soto the zombie stirred, bracing himself. There was no way for
him to get inside the plane.

Whatever happened in there was going to happen, and from the sounds
vibrating through singing hull plates and along cable bundles, all hell
was breaking loose in the cabin.

All he could do was bide his tune and wait to make his move. He was
unsure of what it would be, but somehow he knew it would come to him and
that when the time came, he would know what to do.

In the plane, Frankenstein's time, too, had come. The state of suspended
animation into which he'd fallen when engulfed in the enveloping,
suffocating liquid plastic goo had begun to break when they neared
Visaria, its end accelerated by the softening of the plastic block
encasing the monster. The sunlamps' UV rays had done their work,
triggering catalytic processes inside the monster's body and
neurotransmitters in his brain, firing up his internal furnaces, stoking
his metabolism to a roaring return of full power.

Once that power had returned, the monster took over] In the block,
Frankenstein swelled, his supertough caitij laginous-layered slabs of
cosmic-ray powered muscle ex-1 panding, and die already weakened cube
ceased to bej disintegrating.

Frankenstein shook himself from head to toe, shedding a crystal shower
of tiny dice-sized ice-colored plastic cubes and shards that clung to
him. The floor rang to the tread of his tackle-box-sized feet as he
lumbered around in the aft compartment His movements were stiff, awkward
from the total immobility they'd just endured.

The monster's moves were not without purpose, however.

Far from it Frankenstein knew electricity. His body cells quivered in
anticipation at die nearness of the batteries and cables mat had been
rigged to power the now smashed sunlamps. The promised electrical jolt
of the hissing, sparking ends of severed lengths of live cable was
tantalizing.

Frankenstein grabbed a pair of thickly bundled live cables, holding one
in each hand. Raising mem to his neck, be touched die live ends to die
pair of electrical contact bolts jugging out of either side of his neck.

He held die two bundles of five wires like a pair of long, thick,
muscular, wriggling river eels dial were trying to get away from him.

Crackling, hissing streams of cobalt-blue current went sizzling into
him, turning die bolts white-hot, spewing twin showering streams of blue
sparks.

He soaked up the electricity, his already massive frame swelling with it

Then die circuits shorted out, cutting off die power.

Some of die tights in die compartment went out, several of diem
flickering back to life a moment later. Smoke from the fused metal and
burned rubber insulation set off various alarm flashers and buzzers.

Frankenstein's neck-bolt terminals cooled, glowing orange red, then
fading to a dull sullen ruddy steel color.

Now recharged, he went after Dracula.

Big, clumsy, and solid, he blundered into the bulkhead doorway, bending
the frame when he bumped into it on his way forward, into the main
cabin. He had to duck his square-topped head way down low to avoid
knocking it against the top of the frame.

Straightening up, he stood at the head of the aisle, not far from the
guard Dracula had flung aside, who lay slumped in the aisle, facing the
rear, where he'd been playing dead until he looked up and saw
Frankenstein standing over him.

The guard screamed, trying to get away. When Dracula had smashed him
into the seats, parts of him had broken and weren't working too well
anymore, so he flopped around like a half-squashed bug on the floor,
trying to get away but mostly not getting much of anywhere as he went in
circles.

He kept shrieking all the while. That insectlike drone irritated
Frankenstein's ears, so he lifted one of his pile driver feet and
brought it down on the guard, stepping on him.

When he lifted his foot, the half-squashed guard was now well and truly
squashed.

It was ever Dracula's way to attack, and after the paralyzing immobility
of his torturous and demeaning captivity, he lusted for battle almost as
much as he lusted for blood.

Whirling to face this new foe, he launched himself at Frankenstein,
<teshing up the aisle and throwing himself!

headfirst at the monster.

Frankenstein got a faceful of claws as Dracula at its eyes and throat
The monster raised its hands to pro- J tect itself, falling backward
when bowled over by Dracula's hard-driving momentum.

Together, tearing and battering at each other, they fell backward
through the portal, into the cargo compartment Locked in combat they
rolled around on the floor, Frankenstein fending off the vampire's
deadly thrusdng talons, grabbing at him but unable to hold his wily,
slippery foe.

Breaking loose, they both got to their feet, eyeing each other.
Frankenstein grabbed Dracula's coffin and rammed him with it knocking
him backward. He tried to pin the vampire to the wall, but Dracula was
too fast for him, leaping up on his back and tearing at his face and
throat from behind.

Forward, in the cockpit, the pilot fought the controls, wrestling the
plane back within the very narrow parameters of its near touchdown.

On the field, a red firefighter's utility truck and a boxy white
paramedic's van raced parallel to the airstrip, speeding to the scene. A
line of white police cars with Wue emergency flashers buzzed toward the
scene.

Touchdown. There was a bump, skid, and squeal of rubber tires as the
landing gear contacted the tarmac. The aircraft became a land vehicle,
speeding across the runway, raising its wing flaps to brake its rushing
advance.

Nearing the end of the runway, the plane taxied to a halt, engines
throttling down to a whisper.

Emergency and police personnel closed on the aircraft, a crowd of them,
the landing field ablaze with headlights and emergency flashers, radios
crackling, voices shouting, many footsteps pounding across the tarmac to
the plane.

The plane had halted, but continued to rock and shake, as if from some
internal disturbance. From within came crashing thuds, snarls, the
sounds of things breaking, and screams. There were uniformed policemen
and detectives in civilian clothes, all of whom drew their guns when
they heard the racket that was coming from inside the plane.

While they hadn't been told the whole truth about what they'd be facing,
apparently they'd been informed that the aircraft would be carrying some
unusual individuals. Nerves tautened still more when hydraulics sounded
from within as the portside boarding hatch door began to unseal and
open.

The hatch swung outward and open, its doorway framing dimly lit
emptiness within the plane. From inside came the sound of snarls and
more things being smashed. After all the suspense, it was almost
anticlimactic for no one to emerge, but the police squads and paramedics
and firefighters and other interested Science Palace parties waited,
none making a move toward the plane.

After a pause the open hatchway vomited out a hurtling black flying
shape with a demonic face, bat-eared, red eyed, and fang-mouthed.
Launching itself through the portal, bulleting across the tarmac, it
suddenly unfolded what seemed like a fifteen-foot span of leathery black
bat wings.

The giant bat, for so it was, was as big as a condor, a condor from
hell. Its course sent it plunging headfirst toward a gang of policemen,
who ducked and scrambled, shouting as the thing closed with them in what
seemed an inevitable head-on collision, until at the last instant its
outstretched wings caught some icy updraft of air from a snow squall
that was just now blowing in from the mountains.

The giant bat wheeled to one side, flying almost vertically, with one
wingtip near grazing the pavement, before another crazy looping turn
sent it swooping away from the plane, across the airfield.

The sound of its furiously flapping batwings thundered over the
airfield. One or two policemen fired some tentative shots at it, but a
supervisor in civilian clothes bawled at them to stop wasting
ammunition.

Besides, the thing was flying toward the terminal building, where they
risked shooting innocent persons, if there were any such to be found in
Visaria. Unable to clear the roof of the structure, the giant bat
wheeled around it, rising, wings flapping, making for the center of town
where the towering Science Palace dominated the cityscape.

The shooting had barely died away when Frankenstein squeezed out of the
hatchway, dropping to the asphalt. The tumult that the giant bat had
stirred up was a whispered hush compared to the chaos that broke out
when the monster showed itself.

Those on the tarmac had been weirded out by the giant bat, but they
broke down entirely when Frankenstein dropped in among them. Those in
his way moved aside, fast, or they were clubbed down by his windmilling
arms and legs. Policemen with guns in their hands forgot they had them
as they dodged, getting out of the way.

Frankenstein staggered around on the runway, colliding with a parked
emergency van. Enraged, he pressed his huge hands against its side and
pushed, leaning into it The wheels nearest him left the pavement as the
vehicle tipped over.

Frankenstein started across the field, in the direction Dracula had
flown. The giant bat shape could still be seen, a triangle of ragged
flapping blackness silhouetted against the city lights.

The police rallied, forming up in groups, some shooting at the monster,
whose steady tread missed not a step as it forged forward.

Now that no more monsters had exited the plane, a special Science Palace
security team entered, emerging a moment later with the pilot, copilot,
Julie Evans, and Dorian Winter. Julie kept one hand on Dorian's upper
arm, steering her, indicating that the latter was a captive.

Julie flashed her ID badge, establishing her high-level connection with
the Science Palace, immediately outranking everyone in authority on the
scene.

Julie said, "This woman is my prisoner. Take us to the Science Palace
immediately."

"At once!" the supervisor said, commandeering a car.

Julie hustled Dorian into the backseat, climbing in with her. Other
agents got in the car, which took off like a bullet, hurtling away from
the plane toward the city.

It had all happened fast, too fast for Soto the zombie to make his move.
He had to save Dorian. He didn't know why, and he didn't care why, but
it had to be done. It was the prime directive, the ultimate imperative.
It was a pull that transcended all reason and logic, as irresistible as
the instinct that drives a hawk to hunt or hound to return to its
master.

With all the attention focused toward the city, where the giant bat had
gone, with Frankenstein trailing in pursuit, and where Dorian had now
gone, everybody on the tarmac had their backs turned to the plane.

Nobody saw Soto as he unfolded his creaky limbs from his cramped
position in the wheel-well landing gear bay.

Anyone else would have been dead as soon as the plane had climbed up
from Isla Morgana into the heights, killed by lack of oxygen and deadly
cold.

But for the walking dead, such things have no sting.

Soto lowered himself to the tarmac, doubled himself under the plane's
belly, wriggling out from under it on its far side, and began walking,
taking the long way around the aircraft

Parked nearby was a fire-engine-red utility truck, its powerful motor
idling. The vehicle was (intended, its cab empty, so Soto made for it
He'd reached the cab and was just opening the driver's-side door when a
knot of uniformed firelighters standing nearby took notice of him.
Apparently it was their truck.

They shouted and started toward him. Soto didn't understand their lingo
but he got their meaning nonetheless.

He turned, facing them, letting them get a good look at him in the
lights glaring around the plane.

The firelighters slowed to a halt staring openmouthed at him, at his
glowing eyes and skull face and spidery limbs and the dreadful wounds
puncturing his chest and torso, bullet holes any one of which would have
been fatal to a real live man.

Soto said, "Zombie squad, official business. Back off."

They didn't speak his language, either, but they got the message. They
turned and ran. Soto climbed into the truck cab, put the vehicle in
gear, and drove away in the direction where Dracula and Frankenstein had
gone.

To the Science Palace.

The storm blew down from the mountains, a regular blizzard, complete
with icy winds, heavy snow, and thick masses of charcoal-gray clouds
that came streaming in so low mat their undersides scraped the obelisk
on top of the main tower of the Science Palace building.

Belowground, in the centrally located surgical lab, mat round-floored
space with a high-domed ceiling known as the White Room, experimenters
prepared to attempt the reanimation of the Bride of Frankenstein.

For the better part of a century, since the time of her creation,
coparented by those mad geniuses Henry Frankenstein and Septimus
Pretorius, the Bride had lain dormant, frozen in a state of suspended
animation, a spell of sleep that neither science nor sorcery could
break.

Marya said, "Frankenstein has been put down and raised up many times
since, but the Bride, never. That's because they were put together
differently. The monster is easily revived by electricity, but not her."

She spoke to Glendon, who stood off to the side, an iron ring circling
his neck; a chain that was attached to it was secured to a steel support
strut jutting out from an oversized machine housing.

Marya said, "There's enough slack in the chain for you to sit down on
the floor without strangling yourself, but not so much that you'll be
able to use it to strangle any of my people.

"See what precautions I must take with a fiendish killer like you,
Glendon? I'm sure you'll appreciate the nature of your restraint. I
suppose you could call it a dog collar.

"I don't want you to think me ungrateful. After all, without you, none
of this would be possible. A long strange chain stretches from here
through the decades, a chain longer and stronger than that which now
holds you leashed to heel.

"Your grandfather, Glendon the first, discovered the ultrarare
moonflower in Tibet,.which only blossoms in the moonlight. While there,
he himself was discovered by a werewolf, who bit him, infecting him with
the taint of lycanthropy, transforming him into the legendary Werewolf
of London.

"To speed the growth of the flower, Glendon I used the Moon-Ray
projector, which had been developed by Janos Rukh, the wizard of
physics. Both were in contact with Henry Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius,
who used the Moon-Ray to bring the Bride to life.

"The secret of how to build the projector was lost to orthodox science,
but not to the occult sciences. You, the inheritor of the genetic trait
of lycanthropy through your grandfather, whose very DNA was transformed
by the werewolf's bite, were also the only living link to the original
Glendon.

"Using you as the medium, I was able to channel the ghost of Glendon the
first into your body, learning from him the lost secret of the circuits
needed to make the projector work.

"Now I have it all. You, the Bride, and the secret of the Moon-Ray.

"The Bride will serve me as my slave and as the Eve of an artificially
created superhuman slave race, over whom I shall rule as a god." Glendon
said, "You've got what you wanted, the secret of the Moon-Ray projector.
What does a godling-in training want with me?"

Marya sneered. "So modest! You talk as if there are werewolves to be had
just for the asking, lurking behind every tree and in every dark
corner."

"You mean there aren't? After all the horrors I've seen around here in
the last few days, I find that hard to believe, Countess."

"You should know, you're one of those horrors. Your hereditary
lycanthropy tracks back to Tibet, through Yo gami, not a Tibetan, true,
but one who himself was bitten and infected by a Himalayan man-beast.
Quite different from our European werewolves. From what I've seen, I
rank the Himalayan version a higher order of being than our homegrown
variety.

"When Lawrence Talbot was hi his Wolfman form, he was bestial, a
cannibal and killer. He operated virtually on instinct, with a beast's
cunning. But you, in your werewolf phase, actually show intelligence in
the service of your impulse to mayhem."

"I'm one of your high-class werewolves. How very flattering."

"In any case, Glendon, I could hardly let you go.

There's the matter of the Moon-Ray."

"What's left? You've already squeezed me dry of the operating
information, courtesy of dear old granddad."

"As for the projector, in a sense you could say you're being held
hostage to your grandfather's ghost. My scientists have tested the new
circuits in the prototype projector, and report that they work
perfectly."

"Then what's the problem, Countess?"

"Ghosts. Often they dislike being called back from the Other Side, if
only temporarily, and play tricks. They can be spiteful, vengeful. And
how much more vengeful that ghost may be when it's the shade of the
original Werewolf of London!

"Glendon the first's ghost has no reason to love me or my kind. The
information he supplied, which you channeled, seems solid. My people
can't find any flaws in it, no secret operating codes or demon circuits
that would cause the machine to malfunction or even explode.

"Who knows, when the machine is fully operational, perhaps it will
transform into a kind of electrobomb that will level all of Visaria."

"Sounds like a good idea."

"How bloodthirsty! They're not all like me in Visaria, you know,
Glendon. The vast majority of the population is no different from the
rest of the ordinary human herd, knowing nothing of what goes on in this
place--or even that the Science Palace is anything more than a world
respected foundation and institute of higher learning, what you call a '
tank."

"But having you present during the operation is an added bit of
insurance against trickery from Beyond. After all, if the projector is
rigged to destroy its operators, you'll be destroyed with them."

Glendon was skeptical. "It must work, Countess, be cause if you thought
there was any risk to your own precious skin, you wouldn't be within a
mile of here."

'"Precious skin'? Why, Glendon, how sweet--your first compliment to me.
Believe me, before I'm done with you, my skin will be the most precious
thing in the world to you, and there won't be anything you won't do to
keep it intact and thriving.

"But look, the Moon-Ray machine is just about ready to become
operational."

In the center of the space, engineers supervised a team of technicians
as they finished installing the newly built Projector, an onion-shaped,
barrel-sized gleaming metal bulb, its curves banded with vertical rows
of narrow slitted grates and handlelike flanges, the whole assembly set
in a tubular metal framework with a wheeled base, the hardware knobbed
with junction boxes and spiky connectors, standing in the center of a
mass of power cables.

The chief engineer reported directly to Marya. "All set. We're ready to
power up. We've tested the new circuits, checking them out to the last
decimal points. They work. The Moon-Ray projector is operational. It
gathers and focuses cosmic rays.

"Whether that will work on the Bride is unknown."

"Let's find out," Marya said. "Begin."

The engineer went away, returning to take the technicians through their
final checks. The staging area was cleared of all but essential
personnel, the others going out of the room to observation-post annexes.

Machines were powered up, vibrations shuddering from low-pitched rumbles
through high-pitched whirring.

Banked power relays and instrument consoles hummed, buzzed, clicked.

Marya announced, "Behold the Bride of Frankenstein!"

The White Room had a circular floor and a domed ceiling. Under the
center of the dome was a disk-shaped plate, about ten feet in diameter.
It was actually an elevator platform. As technicians stepped back from
it, a warning beeper sounded and a string of LED diodes set into the
circle of floor bordering the rim of the plate began flashing on and
off.

After sixty seconds of this, the platform began to sink, lowering its
surface below the level of the rest of the floor, revealing a hole in
the floor that accessed another room below.

The platform sank out of sight.

The beepers kept beeping and the lights kept flashing, presumably so no
preoccupied or absentminded types would forget it was there and walk
into the hole. Technicians worked around it, clustering at the
projector, which stood off to one side on its portable floorstand.

After a while the beeping changed to a more insistent, irritating
high-pitched buzzing. The floor lights, too, changed their rhythm,
blinking faster and brighter, more urgently. With a muffled sound of
heavy lifting machinery, something rose from below, where it had been
loaded onto the platform.

On it, rising out of the hole in the floor, was a crystal egg.

The matrix, which was shaped like an egg standing upright on its long
axis, bad been vat-grown from crystals, so that it was eight feet long
and four feet across at its widest. Its surface was faceted, with each
planar face reflecting the lights of the White Room, brightening the
space as the lift platform steadily raised it up.

Like a breakfast egg set in an egg cup, it was mounted in a drum-shaped
pedestal stand, whose knobbed surface was gnarly with input jacks,
plugs, sockets, and connective joints.

The top of the lift platform grew level with the floor as with a final
soft bump it ceased to rise, locking into position under the center of
the room's domed ceiling.

The beeping stopped and the ring of flashing floor lights went dim.

The crystal egg was not solid, but had been hollowed out to accommodate
a human form. Almost human. The matrix was lit from within, so that its
inner glow revealed its occupant.

Marya said, "Behold--the new Eve!"

She was tall, about seven feet, but at least twelve inches or more of
that was taken up by her hair. She was nude, athletic, Amazonian, but
undeniably mammalian and female.

Broad-shouldered, long-limbed. Her flesh was an eerie blue-white color,
like blue-lit porcelain, flawless except for the surgical scars where
the joints had been pieced together and the thoracic and abdominal
cavities resealed after being opened up and worked on.

Her eyes were closed, their lids cobalt blue. She looked neither
sleeping nor dead, but rather artificial, like a mannequin or marble
statue.

Marya smirked. "The ' of Frankenstein'! Was ever a creature so misnamed?
Created by Dr. Pretorius and Henry Frankenstein to be a companion to the
creature that Frankenstein had made. But when our demure miss was
finally introduced to her eager bridegroom, she rejected him so
forcefully and devastatingly that he brought the laboratory tower
crashing down on all their heads, burying all but Henry Frankenstein in
the wreckage.

"Since that night, so long ago--her aborted wedding night--she was been
as you see her now, dormant. Is she dead? Is a seed dead? She is
unliving, but the potential for life is there. If there's a spark of
life buried in her, the Moon-Ray will dig it out. If not, it will
engender one in her.

"She lived once, she can and must live again!" Glendon asked carefully,
"If the ray does return her to life--what then?"

"Then she can go on to fulfill her destiny as the mother of a new race,
a race of super-beings who will replace poor Homo sapiens on this
planet, just as the Cromagnons replaced the Neanderthals, by
extinguishing them."

"Where does that leave you, Countess? Why should the coming race bow to
night creatures like you--"

"And you, Glendon," she reminded him.

"--when they could throw you down just as easily?" Marya said, "They
will obey for the same reason that the downtrodden human masses allow
themselves to slave for the handful of those who rule over them. Why do
the many not revolt against the tyranny of the few? Because they've been
trained not to do so, manipulated, mind controlled, and so programmed
from birth to death that the very idea of revolt to them is unthinkable.

"The same shall be done to the Bride and her future progeny. With
hypnotic mind control and all the arts and sciences of governance and
control, they will be imprinted to love their masters, and to obey us
godlike lords of creation." Glendon said, "Don't be too sure. After all,
it didn't take the original Adam and Eve long before they disobeyed
their creator. And what of that proud rebel Satan?"

Marya radiated fanaticism. "Satan will be with us tonight, if only in
spirit. This is his night--Devil's Night!"

"Careful, Countess. Remember, the devil is a mocker."

"Yes, indeed, Glendon. After all, He took a man of science like you, and
filled you with the power of a hell beast."

Like worker insects tending a queen egg, technicians swarmed around the
crystal container, attaching power and connecting cables to the fittings
in the egg's base.

Measurements were made, gauges calibrated, systems interlinked.

Their tasks done, the drones withdrew to the sidelines, to monitor and
operate the tremendous machineries of creation.

Off to one side, a vertical post rose from the floor, terminating in a
chest-high triangular-shaped keyboard and console. A white-lab-coated
operator stood at the console, activating switches.

More hidden electric motors sounded behind walls and ceilings as a round
portal in the center of the dome bisected, splitting down the middle and
retracting into wall slots to open a cylindrical passage overhead.

The hole in the dome went through the ceiling and the floor above, which
was at the center of the vaulting rotunda-shaped hall just inside the
Science Palace's main entrance. It was under the building's main tower,
under the cupola, which was topped by an obelisk-shaped spire made of
conductive metal.

The spire was an accumulator, a device for collecting and focusing
energy from the heavens and the power of the storm.

There was a storm now, howling, whipping through the city. No ordinary
snow squall, this, not with its booming gusts rocking the cupola on its
framework.

Thick jagged bolts of blue lightning crawled and squirmed among the
undersides of the clouds, moving in seeming slow motion, thick, sullen.
Blue flashes showed through rifts in the streaming overcast, opening up
brief vistas of sky.

There was no thunder.

This silent lightning was much remarked on in Vis aria, as part of that
pattern of wonder and terror that had seized the town this night.

Wild winds were no impediment to the giant bat that now closed on the
heights of the Science Palace. The bat spiraled upward like a black
beach umbrella torn and whipped in a tempest.

Skimming the turbulent blasts of wind in a column of downward circles,
the bat dove straight at the cupola.

The cupola was a birdcage-type steel structural frame fitted with
skylight panels. The flying thing pointed itself at its target and
crash-dived toward it, wings folded flat back along its sides to
streamline its shape, maximizing its projectilelike aspects.

The bat smashed square-on against one of the panels, popping it out of
its frame and plunging down after it into the well of the rotunda.

The bat-thing raced the panel to the floor below, overtaking it, diving
toward the open portal in the rotunda floor, a broad bull's-eye of a
target impossible to miss.

At the last instant, before diving into the well, the bat pulled out of
its fall, suddenly opening wide its wings, extending them to their
fullest. They caught the air, having a parachute effect, slowing its
fall so the giant bat hovered above the hole in the floor, flapping.

Raising its wingtips so they pointed directly over its head, straight
up, it dropped through the floor well, falling through a cylindrical
shaft between the floors, down into the White Room.

Once clear below the dome, the bat again used its parachuting abilities,
hovering above crystal egg, Bride, machines, and machine tenders.

There was a blurring of the bat's form, a shifting as if the
transformation were being seen dimly through a murky, swift-running
stream.

The technicians who saw it were unable quite to focus on it, but when
they looked again, the giant bat had stepped down lightly to the floor,
in the shape of a man, alighting nimbly with a flourish, a theatrical
toss of his vast caped great coat, a cape that had seemed to be actual
giant batwings an instant before.

Behold, Dracula!

The technicians started, taken aback. Someone hit an alarm, and security
men flooded through doors into the room, only to stop in their tracks as
Marya gestured for them to halt.

She said, "This is none of your affair. Get out!" When Marya told them,
they stayed told.

They exited, vanishing as quickly as they entered.

With icy fury, she continued, "As for the rest of you, get back to work.
The experiment will proceed on schedule."

The technicians returned to their tasks, quickly, eagerly, all in a
hurry to do something, anything, that would keep them from having to
face what they had just seen.

But they were well trained, disciplined, and hypnotically programmed to
obey, so they made the transition to their previous unreal routine with
less difficulty than one might think.

Now Marya faced off with Dracula, confronting him.

She said, "Who invited you? I ask that because the iron law of our kind
demands that we can't cross a threshold without first being invited to
enter." Dracula said, "My dear Marya, I was invited long ago, when this
place was new, bidden to enter by its architect and the founder of this
very devil cult that has served us so well ever since. I believe at the
time you were elsewhere, not yet having settled down to your present
routine."

Dracula glanced at Glendon, chain-leashed to a wall.

The vampire lord smiled nostalgically, showing fang tips.

"Still at your old tricks, eh, Marya?"

"I learned them from you."

"And a most apt pupil you have proved to be."

Indicating Glendon, Marya said, "It's not what you think. Professor
Glendon is a werewolf."

Dracula's phony, patronizing smile turned, changing to a scowl. "So? You
play a dangerous game, daughter."

"Like you did with Lawrence Talbot, the Wolfman?"

"Frankly, yes. But that's your affair. Do as you please."

"I do."

"Yes, too much so. I must say that I didn't care for the arrangements
you made to get me here," Dracula said.

His face was stiffly correct, his eyes bloodied. "But for now, I am
willing to let bygones be bygones.

"To be truthful, the island scenery was beginning to pall. A mountain
climate will be a pleasant change.

"Besides, we have a common threat to face, and quickly. Afterward, we
can settle our little familial differences."

Marya, stiff with indignation, could barely shake her head.
"Frankenstein is your worry, not mine."

"Nonsense. Frankenstein is everyone's worry. While he runs around loose,
rampaging, the monster is a menace to us all." "Many have said the same
about you, Count."

"And you foremost among them, no doubt, eh, daughter? I sugges| we
suspend our quarrel until after we've stopped that brainless
monstrosity." Marya said, "That's what I was doing, before you broke
in."

Dracula turned to take in the scene. "I see your plan.

You mean to revive the Bride and set her against him." "Not in the way
you suppose," Marya said. "The monster is alone of all his kind. Even we
vampires, accursed as we are, have others like us with whom to
associate, even if only to hate."

"A personal slur, Marya, but I choose to overlook it."

She went on, as if not hearing him. "In his unique and pathetic
isolation, Frankenstein will do anything to find himself a mate, even
suspend his war against you."

Dracula briefly considered the option, then dismissed it

"When last they met, the Bride rejected him. Why should it be different
now?"

"Because I can make her accept him, in time. Once I've subjugated her to
my will. Through her, I'll also be able to control him.

"If not, there are weapons of super-science and sorcery here that not
even Frankenstein can withstand, not here in my citadel!"

"I say forget the Bride and use the weapons."

"Only as a last resort, Count. Stand aside and stay out of the way, and
I just may be able to thwart your nemesis for you."

"I'm in your hands, daughter." Marya warned, "Don't try to plot against
me. If you do, I'll know it, and I'll put aside everything else to
settle with you. You'll have both Frankenstein and me against you."

The Moon-Ray projector was fixed at one end of a hinged mechanical
armature, not unlike a crane, that allowed it to be moved. It was
positioned directly above the apex of the crystal egg, with its lens end
pointed down, and its funnel-shaped opposite end under the dome's
central air shaft, directly positioned under the bottom terminal pole of
the obelisk-shaped accummulator high above the rotunda, in the cupola.

Marya said, "The accummulator will catch the lightning, beaming it down
to the projector's batteries, fully charging them. Then the circuitry
will transform the energy into a cosmic moon-ray, the life ray under
which the Bride will blossom forth."

Dracula said, "Will it work?"

"Oh, it works, all right. I just don't know if it'll revive the Bride.
There's only one way to find out, and that's to try it."

"Then do so! Frankenstein was close behind me when I took off and flew
away, but it won't be long before he finds me here."

"The circuits are powering up now," Marya said. "And stop giving orders.
I give the orders here."

Ignoring him, she went back to the countdown toward ignition.

Glendon said, "That's your father?"

Not looking up from the board controls, she said, "Never remind me of
that unpleasant fact again, unless you want your tongue ripped out by
the roots."

Under stormy night skies, a lightning bolt jumped the gap from a cloud
to the tip of the obelisk as the black limo bearing Julie Evans and
Dorian Winter and four members of the security force drove up to the
front stairs of the Science Palace, on the south side of the square.

Car doors sliced open and passengers tumbled out, four men in dark hats
and topcoats forming a wedge around Julie and her prisoner. They started
up the stairs, bowed forward to avoid the force of the wind-driven snow.
The palace, stairs, and square were already coated under a few inches of
thick, fresh, wet glistening whiteness.

Reaching the top steps, they found that all the bronze double doors were
sealed. One of the crew said, "They're running the accumulator."

Julie Evans said, "I have to deliver this prisoner and report to the
Countess."

"Those doors will stay shut until the process is done.

For safety reasons, they can't be opened while the accumulator is
firing."

The accumulator was firing, charging the Moon-Ray projector.

The machine glowed, outlined by a purple aura that steadily brightened,
turning the room purple white with eerie shining radiance. Faces turned
purple blue, lips turned black, protective goggles were bulging insect
eyes.

More switches were thrown, more power generated.

Energy built, shimmering web-waves of interlaced harmonics.

The air crackled with energy, sparkling with it.

Glendon fidgeted. The backwash of energy was getting to him, making his
skin tingle from the inside out.

Powered fully up, the projector spat, its bulbous lens device spearing a
purple-white beam into the the crystal egg.

The egg shuddered, vibrating in a complex mesh of high-frequency
energies. Within, the Bride was showered in purple-white radiance, which
bathed her form.

Currents of air eddied around the chamber, swirling, whipping up grit
and dust, whirling it around.

Some side effect of the beam got to Glendon, driving him wild,
whipsawing through him, rattling the plates of his skull and heating the
joints of his bones white-hot.

Agonized, he hollered and howled, shouting, tearing at his chain,
beating the wall with his fists.

None of the technicians, however, showed any ill effects from the beam,
and they were closer to it than he was. The vampires were likewise
unaffected.

They had to shout to be heard over the rising din of machine noises.

Dracula said, "Your pet will do himself an injury!" Mary a said, "It
must be the Moon-Ray! As a lycanthrope, he's more sensitive to its
influences!"

"Interesting!"

"Too bad for him! But there's no stopping the experiment now!"

On monitor-screen graphs, vital-sign and life-function waves, previously
flat-lined, now spiked into vigorous, pulsing sine-wave curves.

An excited med-tech shouted, "It's working! There's a reaction in the
subject's vital signs! Heart, respiration, brain waves, all just came
online!"

The egg shimmered, throwing off coruscating bands of purple-blue
whiteness. Within, the Bride's form was blurred.

"Is she moving?!"

A systems overseer reported, "The energy's going into the system and not
coming out. She's soaking it up!"

Outside, Nemesis came striding, big long-legged strides that quickly cut
the distance between it and the Science Palace as it angled across the
square toward the front of the building.

Frankenstein was on the move, his leaden footfalls thudding hollowly
against the snow-covered paving stones of the square.

Most of his pursuers had been shaken, left behind. But then, they really
didn't try to chase him very hard, because if they did, they might catch
him, and then what would they do?

The secretive powers that operated out of the citadel, the real masters
of Visaria--let them handle the insoluble problem of a nonstop Titan who
couldn't be, but was.

Frankenstein climbed the broad shallow swooping flights of stairs
leading up to the main entrance of the Science Palace. At the sight of
him, the four security men ran away. Julie Evans grabbed Dorian's arm,
clutching tight, steering her to one side, out of the monster's path.

He ignored the women, cowering behind nearby pillars, as he raised his
immense fists and battered them against the tall bronze doors, battering
them down.

Inside, the entrance-hall rotunda was lit from below with purple light,
shining up through a hole in the floor.

The monster lumbered to the portal, crouching at its edge, its inhuman
features underlit by diamond-hard purple white radiance.

Curious, trying to make sense of this strange yet some how familiar
phenomenon, Frankenstein hooked his huge hands on the rim of the hole,
lowering himself down through it, hanging by his arms.

It wasn't a long drop, and such dangers were meaningless to him anyway.
He let go, falling through the hole, down into the White Room.

As he plummeted, an arm hit the projector's mechanical steering arm,
batting it to one side as he came crash big to the lab floor, narrowly
missing the egg.

No longer fed by the Moon-Ray, the egg's blinding glow cycled down, its
radiance dimming, paling. With a sound like tumblers and bolts clicking,
the egg unsealed, a longitudinal seam running down it from tip to base.

The egg opened and out stepped the Bride, her open eyes pools of
crackling blue energy.

Frankenstein had picked himself up and turned toward Dracula, but before
he could lunge toward his enemy, he caught sight of the Bride. He froze,
transfixed by the vision.

He did not remain motionless for long. Face set, slab shoulders squared,
he altered course, Dracula forgotten as he veered toward the Bride. She
was turned in another direction and didn't see him.

He reached for her, touching her. There was a purple blue flash, a
sizzling shock, and Frankenstein snatched his hand away, stung,
confused.

The Bride was aware of him now. She turned to face him, stiffening at
the sight of him.

He reached for her again, to take her hand. Even before his hand touched
hers, sparks were struck and little lightning bolts leaped out from his
flesh and hers, physically pushing them apart.

With the fury of the brute primitive facing the Un known, Frankenstein
lunged for the female, reaching for her, grabbing with both hands. She
hissed her displeasure, but he continued his advance.

His more forceful rush triggered an equally forceful and violent
reaction, a tremendous electrical discharge that slammed like a
thunderclap, shoving them both apart.

Marya said, "Why can't he touch her? What's holding them apart?"

Glendon laughed, and they all turned to look at him, even Frankenstein
and the Bride, though how much the last two understood of what he said
was questionable.

"The law of opposites," Glendon said, seeing incomprehension on their
faces. "Don't you understand? Opposite poles attract, but similarly
charged poles repel." He laughed again at the blank looks they all gave
him.

"Frankenstein and the Bride are both electrically charged creatures.
Electricity is their power, their life force. But the Moon-Ray has
charged the Bride with the same charge as the monster!

"Ever try putting two magnets together? You can't do it! The harder you
push them together, the harder they seem to pull away!

"It's the same with the so-called Adam and Eve of your new super-race,
Countess! They literally can't touch, because every time they try, their
like charges will push them away, repelling one from the other!"

As Glendon spoke, Frankenstein started toward the Bride. She shrank from
him, trying to get away. He had to chase her, and when he grabbed for
her wrist, he was shocked with another painful crackling discharge.

Now Dracula understood what was happening, and he, too, laughed
diabolically. "What a black joke! The one creature in all the world made
to be a mate for that brainless brute, and he can't even touch her!

"Truly, love is cruel!"

That did it for the monster. It may not have fully understood the
meaning of Dracula's words, but their hateful, sneering tone was
unmistakable.

"Look out! He's gone berserk!"

Frankenstein began to rampage, rocketing into a whole new level of
cosmic fury. He shoved the crystal egg, over aiming it.

As it fell, it hit the projector's armature, sending the still-active
Moon-Ray sweeping across the room. The beam fell on Glendon, causing his
flesh to run like water, a development that went momentarily unnoticed
in the havoc Frankenstein was wreaking.

Technicians ran for the doors, colliding with security forces rushing
in.

Where Glendon had stood, chained to the wall, mere now stood the
werewolf. Not bothering with the leash chain, he took hold of the iron
collar around his neck, bending it like licorice, tearing it apart.

Dracula said, "Werewolf!? How can that be? The last night of the full
moon has come and gone!"

Marya groaned. "The Moon-Ray did it!"

Nimble, scampering, the werewolf jumped up on top of an instrument
console, ran across it, hurtled me gap to another instrument bank, and
leaped clear of it as it toppled.

His path had brought him to the Moon-Ray projector, which continued
beaming its ray, though its bent armature had directed the beam to the
far side of the room.

The werewolf's taloned fingers worked the switches, setting the dials
for maximum release of the mighty stores of power with which the
accummulator had charged the projector's ranked rows of batteries. Here
was a fiend who could think!

On full power, the ray turned a luminous silver color, melting and
vaporizing whatever it touched. The cosmic power was now unleashed as a
disintegrator ray.

Holding the projector barrel in both hands, the werewolf swept the
lethal beam across the room, disintegrating all with which it came in
contact.

Standing side by side, backs to the wall, were Dracula and his daughter,
Marya. Both started to shift shape, changing into giant bats so they
could fly away and escape.

The now-annihilating Moon-Ray swept over them, generating twin shrieks
of pain and outrage as the vampires were volatilized into clouds of
glittering moondust.

Above, in the rotunda, Julie Evans held a gun to Dorian's head, covering
her as they stood edging cautiously toward the rim of the portal,
through which smoke rose and an unholy pandemonium below could be heard
and fitfully seen.

Julie said, "None of your witch tricks is faster than a bullet, so don't
try anything stupid. What's happening down there?" Dorian said, "How
should I know?"

"Because you're a witch and you've got the power of second sight! You'll
stay alive only as long as you're useful to me. Now tell me what's going
on, witch, or I'll--"

Julie went to prod Dorian in the ribs to show she meant business, but
before she could do so, the gun was suddenly taken from her hand.

Taken by a walking dead man.

Soto stood behind her, having sneaked up on her with his zombie's soft,
creeping tread. He twisted Julie's wrist, moving the gun aside. He
twisted too hard and the wrist broke, forcing a scream from her. He
grabbed the gun, breaking her finger on the trigger guard, as he held
her from behind, one arm circling her waist

Julie's reaction was a mixture of pain and horror. Dorian stepped back,
allowing herself a single smile of triumph.

She said, "I see you've met my zombie boyfriend, Julie. He followed me
all the way from Isla Morgana to save me. It's easy to do such things,
when you're a witch."

Julie squirmed and struggled, but there was no escape.

Her martial-arts techniques and nerve-pinching holds and such were
useless against a living dead man who felt no pain.

Julie said, "Let me go, let me go--"

Soto held her over the hole in the floor.

She shrieked, "What're you going to do to me--no, not that! Don't drop
me down the hole, don't--"

"C'mon, baby, be my party doll in hell," he said, letting go.

Julie Evans fell screaming out of sight.

Cracks opened in the rotunda floor, purple light shining up through mem,
caused by the runaway disintegrator beam mat was wielded by the werewolf
down below.

Soto faced Dorian. "So you're the one who got me to follow you all the
way from the island. I knew it wasn't me, because I plain just don't
give a good damn about anything. It's like that, when you're dead."
"That's no surprise," she said. "You were like that when you were
alive."

"So it turns out I was a pawn all the time, just getting moved around on
the board."

"Now the game is done, Soto."

"Yeah? Not much future in being dead, if you know what I mean."

"I do. Believe me, I do."

"I thought you would, Dorian. See you later," Soto said. Raising two
fingers in a half salute, he turned from her and stepped through the
hole, dropping from sight in the upwelling purple radiance.

Dorian turned, racing out the front doors and down the stairs and
halfway across the square before the runaway death beam brought the
Science Palace crashing down on the underground lab, now a crypt of
monsters whose loves and hates were essentially no different from those
of the human race, of which they were a twisted but not entirely
unrecognizable caricature.

For the devil is a mocker.