When he found his voice, Rick whispered, “I’d rather not know for sure.”

Upstairs in the attic of the old mansion, Murhder re-formed and walked over to one of the dormers. As a vampire, he supposed his rescue of the bat, who was lapping up the welling blood on his forefinger and incapable of comprehending the breadth of salvation just rendered upon him, could be termed a professional courtesy.

Assuming you went by human mythology.

In reality, there was not much in common to be had. Vampires needed the blood of a member of their opposite sex to be at optimal strength and health—a nourishment he had not had for many years, and a requirement that he had been forced to forage for from lesser sources. Most bats, on the other hand, lived off of insects, although clearly, there was an exception to be made for what he had offered this present mammal. The two species were as separate as dogs and cats, although Homo sapiens had linked them through all manner of books, movies, TV, and the like.

Opening one-half of the arch-topped window, he extended his arm and shook the bat free, the creature winging out into the night, crossing over the shining face of the risen moon.

When he had purchased the Eliahu Rathboone B&B from its original owner, some century and a half prior, he had intended to live in it alone during his dotage. Not how things had ended up. Twenty years ago, as a result of his breakdown, he had been in the prime of life yet the throes of insanity, burned out and very much crazy, ready to wander empty rooms in the hope his mind followed the example and moved out the soul-destroying images that were cluttering up his memory banks.

No such luck. On the alone front, that was. The house had come with staff who needed jobs, and returning guests who wanted the same room for their anniversary every year, and bookings for weddings that had been made months in advance.

In an earlier incarnation of himself, he would have fucked all of it off. With everything that had happened, however, he hadn’t known who he was anymore. His personality, his character, his soul, had been through a trial of fire and failed the test. As a result, his superstructure had been collapsing, his building coming down, his once strong and resolute construction of character turning to rubble.

So he had let the humans continue to come and work and sleep and eat and argue and make love and live around him. It was the kind of move someone who was lost in the world made, a Hail Mary that was uncharacteristic and desperate, a maybe-this-will-keep-me-on-the-planet from a person in whom gravity was no longer all that interested.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, it was a horrible lightness to be insane. To feel like a balloon on a string, no ground under your feet, only a thin tether tying you to a reality you were imminently going to slip free of.

He closed the window and walked over to the trestle table he spent so many hours at. No computer on its old, chipped surface, no telephone or cell phone, no iPad or flat screen TV. Just a candleholder with a lit length of beeswax … and three letters … and a flat envelope marked FedEx.

Murhder sat down on the old wooden chair, the spindle legs protesting his weight with a creaking.

Reaching into the folds of his black shirt, he pulled out his talisman. Between the pads of his thumb and forefinger, the shard of sacred glass, wrapped in bands of black silk, was a familiar worry bead. But it was more than something for an anxious hand to toy with.

On its long silk cord, he could extend it out such that he could see the glass, and presently, he stared into its transparent face.

Some thirty years ago, he had stolen the piece of a seeing bowl from the Temple of Scribes. Totally illegal to do so. He had told no one. The Brotherhood had gone up to the Scribe Virgin’s sanctuary, where her Chosen were sequestered, to defend what should have been sacrosanct from invaders who were of the species. The Primale, the male who serviced the sacred females to provide next generations of Brotherhood members and Chosen, had been slaughtered, and the Treasury, with its inestimable wealth, had been in the process of being looted.

As always ill-gotten financial gain had been the mens rea.

Murhder had chased one of the raiders into the Temple of Scribes, and in the course of the ensuing fight, several of the workstations, where the Chosen peered into the crystal seeing bowls and recorded the goings-on down on earth, had been crashed into. After he had killed the felon, he had stood among the ruination of the orderly rows of tables and chairs and wanted to weep.

The sanctuary should never have been defiled, and he prayed that no Chosen had been injured—or worse.

He had been about to drag the body out onto the lawn when something had flashed and caught his eye. The sanctuary, being on the Other Side, had no discernible light source, just a glow across its milky white sky, so he had been unsure what had made anything wink like that.

And then it had happened again.

Stepping through the debris and bloodstains, he had stood over the glass shard. Three inches long and wide, in a lozenge shape, it had appeared as a dead combatant on a field of war.

The thing had done it a third time, that shimmer sparking up from nowhere.

As if it were attempting to communicate with him.

Murhder had slipped it into the pocket of his combat vest and not thought of the shard again. Until three nights later. He had been going through his gear, looking for a missing knife, when he’d discovered it.

That was when the sacred glass had shown him the beautiful female’s face.

So shocked had he been with what he’d seen that he’d fumbled the shard, cutting himself as he dropped it.

When he’d picked the thing up, his blood had turned the portrait red. But she was there all right—and the sight of her carved a piece of his heart out. She was terrified, her wide, scared eyes peeled open so that the whites showed, her mouth parted in shock, her skin pulled tight over her features.

The vision chilled him to the bone and promptly invaded his nightmares. Was it a Chosen who had been hurt during the sanctuary break-in? Or some other female he could still help?

Years later, he had learned who it was. And failing her had been the final blow that cost him his sanity.

Tucking the sacred shard back under his shirt, he looked at the FedEx envelope. The documents inside had already been signed by him, the inheritance left by a relation he only vaguely remembered renounced and sent further down the bloodline to another recipient, also someone he was only tangentially aware of.

Wrath, the great Blind King, had demanded them be executed. And Murhder had used that royal order as a pretext to get an audience.

The three letters were the thing.

He brought them closer, pulling them across the varnished wood. The writing on the envelopes was done in proper ink, not the stuff that came out of Bics, and the lettering was shaky, the hand wielding whatever instrument had been used palsied and therefore only partially controlled.

Eliahu Rathboone

Eliahu Rathboone House

Sharing Cross, South Carolina

No street address. No zip code. But Sharing Cross was a little town, and everyone, including the postmaster, who was also the postal deliveryman and the mayor, knew where the B&B could be found—and was aware that people at times fancied communication with a dead figure of history.

Murhder was not, in fact, Eliahu Rathboone. He had, however, put an old portrait of himself down in the front hall to mark the property as his own, and that had ignited the false identification. People “saw” the ghost of Eliahu Rathboone on the grounds and in the house from time to time, and in the modern era, those reports of a long-haired, shadowy form had spurred amateur ghost hunters and then professional ones into coming and obtaining footage.