Trust only yourself!

The driver took her to the rental agency. She was a wreck as she got into the Honda and checked the map they had given her. She had been to New Orleans before, and she loved the city. But she wasn’t that familiar with the streets.

And I’m not thinking clearly! I’m exhausted, and I’m frightened, and I may, after all, be really, truly, crazy.

She forced herself to concentrate on the road. She had already taken a wrong turn somewhere. She was on the outskirts of the French Quarter, but she needed to find the road to the old plantations.

She couldn’t drive and read the map; she had to pull over. She tried to find the inside light switch, but could not. She stared around, then realized that she was outside the gates of one of the city’s famed old cemeteries. Looking through the wrought iron, she could see winged angels, crosses, and the glowing shapes of a half dozen mausoleums. Fog was settling around the ground. Swirling, creating strange, eerie shapes.

She had to get out of here.

She opened the driver’s door just a hair, and the lights popped on. As she looked at the map, she was startled and then panicked by a knock at her window.

“Hey, lady, you got a dollar? Maybe you got a twenty? A five?” The man holding on to her door was filthy. He was a white man with a thick beard, a horrendous scent, and so much dirt on him that he was the color of an islander. “Hey, lady, I know I smell. Hey, just cause there’s whiskey on my breath now, doesn’t mean I’m going to go buy more booze. Okay, you got some change?”

She saw his teeth. Or what he had of them. They were green and slimy. She had a vision of him changing into something else, with salivating fangs, right before her.

She screamed. Her scream startled him.

He screamed and stepped back. She gunned the car. The automobile burst out on to the road with a shriek of tires.

She didn’t know which direction she was going in. She just drove.

Rudy Trenton stood on the street, watching the little red Honda drive off into the night. He shook his head, then removed his baseball cap, and scratched his head.

“Okay, lady, so I do want to buy more whiskey!” he muttered. He shook his head. “Crazy. What the hell is this world coming to? Maybe I shouldn’t have asked for the twenty. Some folks just don’t know about inflation.”

He stretched, thinking it was time to hop the fence and find himself a nice little nook in one of the mausoleums. Lots of them were locked, but some of them were really old, and the decaying corpses inside had no living relatives left in the vicinity, so it was easy enough to crawl in and get some shelter from the night.

He grinned. Folks were scared of cemeteries. Dumb. Weren’t no people less dangerous than dead folk.

Hell, no, dead folks couldn’t hurt you any.

Rudy turned. To his amazement, there was a man coming out of the cemetery. Or was he a man? How could he have come out of the cemetery? The gates were still locked; he hadn’t jumped over the fence, as Rudy intended to do.

“Hey, buddy, you got a twenty, a five, a one, a quarter? I need some food, man.”

“All right, so I need a drink.”

The man smiled, as if amused by Rudy’s request. Rudy smiled back. He was going to get lucky. This fellow looked as if he understood a fellow’s need for a drink now and then.

“Yeah, I really need a drink,” Rudy said.

The fellow laughed out loud.

“So do I,” he told Rudy.

Rudy started to grin.

He was still grinning when the man gripped his shoulders. He didn’t stop grinning until he felt something

... pain. Agony. The bones in his shoulders breaking . ..

He started to scream, but the sound was broken off almost immediately as his jugular was slit and the sound was drowned out by the flow of his own blood.

Jordan reached the house at last. At least she thought it was the house. It was a mansion, a beautiful old plantation, kept in top-notch shape. The porch was expansive with traditional columns, and a welcoming, white-painted swing. She glanced at the address she had written down, and at the number on the house again.

Yes, this was it.

She got out of the car, fingering the cross at her neck, patting her purse to assure herself she had her vial of holy water handy.

If this cop is legit, he’s going to think I’m crazy!

Still, she had come this far.

Resolutely, she slammed the door of the Honda, strode across the lawn and up the steps, and knocked on the door.

It was immediately opened by the woman who had been at the airport. “Thank God!” she said earnestly.

Jordan felt herself blush as she stood there awkwardly. “I’m sorry; I’ve just had so many strange things occurring lately?”

“Yes, of course, I understand. We were still worried. Come in, come in.” Even then, Jordan hesitated. But she heard the reassuring cry of a young child in the background and she stepped over the threshold of the house. A tall, dark-haired man shook her hand as she came in.

“Mr. Canady?” she murmured.

“No, I’m Lucian DeVeau,” he told her. “Jade’s husband.” He turned, indicating a woman behind him who was holding the toddler. “This is Maggie Canady, and Sean is right through there in the office. I was about to go out and try to find you. Jade has been very upset since she lost you at the airport.”

“Again, I’m very sorry.”

“You’re here?it’s all completely understandable. Come on in, we can all talk.” As she stepped through the foyer, she noted the historic beauty of the house. A grand stairway rose from the entry, and at the landing, there was an exquisite painting of a beautiful woman in mid-nineteenth-century dress.

“Lovely house,” she murmured.

“Thank you,” Maggie said. “I’m just going to put this one to bed; I’ll be right with you all. You must be exhausted ... tired, hungry, thirsty. But Jade can get you anything you need.”

“Thank you.”

This was very strange. All these people seemed to have been expecting her, and they all seemed to think it was quite normal that she should be here; in fact, they seemed more than relieved that she had come.

“This way,” Lucian said.

“This is very rude, of course,” Jordan murmured. “But...”

“I’m the publisher of Sean’s book,” Jade said. “And Lucian . ..”

“Let her meet Sean,” Lucian suggested. “And then we can begin the explanations that she isn’t going to believe.”

She had been expecting to tell a story that no one was going to believe.

Lucian led the way across the room to a library with double doors. As she walked in, she saw a man leaning against a mantel, a drink in his hand, as he spoke to someone across the room.

“Sean, she’s arrived. I didn’t have to look for her,” Lucian said.

“So you’re Jordan Riley,” Sean Canady said. He was about forty, fit and handsome, with fine, serious eyes. She started across the room, ready to shake his hand.

Then she saw the man to whom he had been speaking.

She froze where she stood; Ragnor Wulfsson was standing just across the room from where Canady leaned against the mantel.

“Jordan,” Ragnor began, walking toward her.

God! This was it! She had traveled through the night, only across the expanse of the Atlantic, to find herself facing the same terror.

There would be no escape here, she thought. She had run from a place with friends and family, and she was here alone and he was here.

No escape . . .

She pictured Tiff’s ashen body, saw her shoulders pull free from her head.

She turned and ran.

Ignoring the startled cries of Jade DeVeau, she shoved the woman out of her way and fled from the house, bursting through the front door, racing down the steps. She hopped into the Honda and gunned the motor, realizing that she could mire the car in the unpaved driveway if she didn’t calm down and use some sense. She didn’t even know where she was driving. She peeled out, and shot along the lonely strip of road.

Suddenly, she slammed on her brakes. There was something in the road ahead of her. A shadow. A shape ...

A man. Her lights focused on a man standing in her path. Ragnor.

She hit the button for her window.

“Move out of the way. I swear, I’ll run you over.”

“Jordan, stop it, you’re in danger?”

“From you!”

“No, damn you, not from me. Will you come back to the house and talk? We will do our best to explain.”

“Explain that you’re monsters, and that you kill people, and that Sean Canady writes about vampires with such knowledge because he is one?”

“Sean isn’t a vampire.”

“But?you are?”

“Jordan, I have to explain?”

She didn’t let him finish. She floored the car, sickened that she was going to hit him, but so panicked that she could do nothing else. Yet as the car sped across the highway, Ragnor seemed to fade into the darkness.

She slowed when she came to a crossroad, peering through the window, trying desperately to decide which way to go to get back to people?lots of people. Normal people.

Then she let out a scream of terror. Ragnor was at her window. “Jordan, you’ve got to listen to me?” Once again, she hit the gas pedal, shot out into the intersection. A car was coming from the left. He blared his horn.

Jordan swerved and lost control. The car spun. The next thing she knew, she was flying into the foliage at the side of the road. The car came to a violent halt as she hit a tree stump. She’d neglected to wear a seat belt in her haste to escape. She only kept herself in the car and in one piece with the death grip she had on the steering wheel.

“Jordan!” She heard his deep voice as he called to her. In panic she pushed open the door and started to run into the night.

“Jordan!”

The next thing she knew, he was behind her, his hands on her shoulders. She turned, screaming, kicking, fighting. In her effort to free herself from his grasp, she stumbled backward in a pile of weeds and fell flat, bringing him down with her.