There came a knock on the door of the Room 415, and Basil jumped, startled. He had spent the past two hours pouring over a stack of drawings he had made; he had had the ream of paper and the ink pens brought up via room service. The drawings he had produced, with little more than a ruler and his memory, were not high art; they were mostly circuit schematics and mechanical diagrams, and a long list of the parts he would need. He had arranged for them to be delivered via same-day deliver from Amazon, through Federal Express. That was probably them right now at the door. He glanced over at the others. They were restless; they wanted out — to hunt, to feed. Out there, on the convention floor, there walked dozens of tasty snacks and meals on legs. His Coven, the Simulacyrica were the only ones who tried to abstain from feeding on Humans, sticking to bagged blood and animals most of the time. The other Covens — such as the other five here represented — had few such scruples. The others leaned on the walls and laid on the beds, reading and fiddling with laptop computers, cell-phones, and tablets. He could not keep them pent-up in here for much longer.

  “Basil,” said the one named Thrallia, “we grow listless here, with all this waiting. We need out of this room. To roam, to wander, to kill, to feed. I know you say it’s wise for us to keep a low profile . . . and that your Coven has . . . misgivings about feeding on Humans. But ours don’t. You have to acquiesce to that unavoidable reality sooner or later, if you’re going to lead us to anything but starvation.”

  Basil started to reply, but the knock on the door came again. He held up a single finger, signaling for her to wait, and got up from where he sat and crossed to the door. Looked out the peep-hole. Sure enough, a man in a brown shirt and pants, with several brown boxes stacked on top of a dolly stood there, preparing to knock again.

  “It’s the delivery service,” he said to her. “And no, you cannot eat him.”

  “Damn,” said Thrallia.

  Basil licked his lips — he himself had grown peckish; he could feel it in his veins, his arteries, his stomach, all of his body. All of him, crying out for blood. “Very soon now.” He opened the door, and smiled at the delivery man. The delivery man produced a clipboard, and prompted Basil to sign for the packages.

  “Thanks,” he said when Basil had finished. “Uh, where can I drop these?”

  “Just inside the door will suffice, young man,” said Basil. He picked up the first of the boxes — heavy, just as he’d expected — and sat it just inside the room. The delivery man stacked the other two on top of it, and then showed himself out. Basil closed the door behind him.

  “Didn’t I say the parts would arrive within two hours?” he said, but no one seemed very enthused. He sighed. He had hoped to avoid this, but now he saw no other way forward. “Er, ah . . . Listen, everyone,” he said, putting down his pen on the table. The others all turned toward him, their eyes begging for more excitement than this. “I’ve made a decision. What I said earlier, about lying low, staying out of sight . . . perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I’m being overly cautious. Hell, maybe I’m just plain paranoid. And you guys . . . Dammit, you guys have been through hell. So . . . go on out there, if you want to. Explore the con. Hunt. Feed. Just stay in contact, alright? Come back here and check in at regular intervals, if you would. And if you feed on any Humans . . . Please, be discreet. Don’t make it someone who’ll be missed. And don’t kill any of them if you don’t absolutely have to, either . . . and if you do — kill any Humans, that is — please dispose of the body properly. We don’t need the trouble of the Human police knocking on our suite’s door at three in the morning asking any annoying questions. And if you should spot one of Vynovich’s crowd? Whatever you do, do not engage them unless you’re wearing one of the Geist-Verst?rkers. In fact — each of you, take one with you if you’re going.”

  “Thank you, Basil. We’ll try not to cause too much . . . disruption.” Thrallia, Trazeal, Razor, and Bryce all rose from where they sat. Balthazar, his bodyguard Vivacia, his secretary Gnarl, and Giova, Ripley, and Dana also stood. Balthazar straightened his suit, as did Gnarl. Vivacia worked out a crick in her neck.

  “Good, finally,” she said. “Enough of this sitting around. I’m ready for some action and maybe a little blood-hunting. The mortals at this convention . . . they will make for good sport.”

  “If sir will excuse me, my appetite, it calls to me as well,” said Gnarl, with a slight bow to Balthazar, who nodded to him. Gnarl marched to the trunk Basil had placed near the doors and opened it, and removed one of the Geist-Verst?rkers, and turned it on the way Basil had instructed them earlier. He placed it on his head and exited the room. Vivacia did the same, and followed him.

  “There’s strength in numbers,” said Basil, “so try and stick together if you can. Now go . . . Go on, all of you! Go on and have some fun! I’ll keep working here.”

  “Finally, time to eat,” said Trazeal. He followed Vivacia and Gnarl’s lead, as did Thrallia right after him. Razor and Bryce followed suit. Ripley, in her bright red evening gown, was the last to head out. “I’ll be back,” she said. “Don’t wait up for me. I might find some sexy mortal and bed down for the night . . . before feasting upon him, that is.”

  “Just be careful,” said Basil. “And like I said — try to remain inconspicuous. As best you can, at least.”

  Ripley gave him a half-smile. “Don’t I always?” She put the contraption on her head like a tiara, and activated it. It began to glow. “At least I blend right in at this convention, wearing this thing.” She left the room, and the door clicked behind her. Only Giova, Dana, and Balthazar remained behind.

  “Well?” said Basil, to the three of them. “Aren’t you headed out for a night of frolicking and bloody fun?”

  Dana spoke first. “Never mind fun. And I’m not hungry, either. Basil. We need to talk. About what Vynovich plans to do. What he’s planning . . . it’s monstrous! It’s suicide! And for the rest of us — all of us — it could mean certain death, if not worse!”

  “I know that,” said Basil. “Fortunately, I don’t think that Vynovich is science-literate enough to know how to use Les Orogrü-Nathr?ks’ Simulacra-built technology to interact with Orogrü-Nathr?k, let alone wake him from his slumber, which I don’t think the tools to do exist just yet. Or at least they didn’t until just now. I should know. I helped design the tech that your Coven uses to communicate with the fallen Elder God. I know what it can — and can’t — do. Hence why I’m sitting here designing — among other things — the very thing a Vampire would need if he or she wanted to wake the slumbering eldritch beast that sleeps in — and is connected to — the planet itself, and take control of the immense power that such a monstrous creature could channel.”

  “Say what?” said Giova. “Basil, what on Earth is wrong with you?”

  Dana leapt toward him and sat down in the second chair beside the room’s small office table where Basil sat working. Balthazar remained standing and leaned on the wall, his hands in his pockets but a look of deep concern and worry etched onto his masculine features.

  “You heard me,” said Basil. “I’m designing — among other things — the very thing that can do what Vynovich wishes to attempt. An attempt which will, of course — without the device I’m building — fail miserably, and will probably deliver him his Eternal Death in the bargain. The trash thus takes itself out. And, with this device under our control . . . we will destroy whatever army he has raised, in one fell swoop, by channeling the power of Orogrü-Nathr?k ourselves. Safely. Now if we could only find a faster way to get to California — ”

  “Um, yeah, about that,” said Dana, licking her lips. She closed her eyes and sighed. In a hurried, rushed tone, she said: “The Temple in California isn’t the seat of Les Orogrü-Nathr?ks’ power or the focus of our worship, like everyone thinks it is. It’s not the Nexus of Orogrü-Nathr?k’s power. It’s not where his essence is concentrated, the way we’ve led everyone to believe.”

  “What?” said Giova. “You mean the Temple isn’t where lies the Fallen One’s seat of power?”

  “No,” said Dana. She sighed again. “It isn’t.”

  “Well, this certainly got interesting in a hurry,” said Balthazar.

  “Ohh-kay,” said Basil, his eyebrows going up. This was certainly new. From everything he knew, everything he’d been told since time immemorial, Les Orogrü-Nathr?ks worshipped at a Temple in California where a large number of ley-lines all converged, a place where the barrier between worlds was thinnest, where there stood a portal between the “real,” physical world, and the “abstract” realm where Orogrü-Nathr?k’s true essence dwelled, caught up as it was with the Platonic essence of the Earth. Apparently, the Orogrü-Nathr?ks had been less than truthful when they had told the rest of the Vampire Nation about this portal to another realm. So — it either didn’t exist, this portal, or —

  “Alright,” he said. “Where is the portal actually located?”

  “Here,” said Dana. Balthazar’s eyebrows went up as she continued: “Right here, in Massachusetts. Cambridge, in fact. In fact, it’s right beneath our feet, right now.”

  “Wait — do you mean to tell me — ”

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean right beneath our feet. Under this hotel, in fact. In the sub-basement level of the Renaissance Regency Hotel and Convention Center, originally a MBTA subway station, but closed off an eternity ago. You weren’t kidding when you talked about synchronicities. This is one — a big one. We’re sitting on a nexus of ley-lines that makes the temple out in California look like a simple geometry problem for third-graders. The natural concentration of power here is . . . considerably greater than at the old junction. Staggering, in fact. Here, Orogrü-Nathr?k’s dreams are . . . even more potent, and press upon the fabric of the world to an even greater degree. The visions here are . . . much more vivid. We can commune with him — or his slumbering consciousness — more readily here. That doesn’t mean he’d be any less cranky if Vynovich or anyone else woke him up, though.”

  “Dear Gods,” breathed Basil. “Vynovich . . . does he know? Does he suspect?”

  “We don’t know,” said Dana. “We don’t think so. Or if he does know, he hasn’t made any moves that would tell us for sure that he does.”

  “He can never know!” cried Balthazar. “Dear gods above, if he knew — !”

  “Dana,” said Basil, standing up and taking her by the arms, “he cannot find out. If he does — if he figures that out — and he manages to take from us the device I’m building here for our use — then all hope is lost. He will awaken Orogrü-Nathr?k, and your Elder God will rape and burn the heavens and destroy all life on Earth! Vynovich is a rank, arrogant fool if he thinks he can force one of the Eidolon to do his will!”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” said Dana. “There’s also something else, Something I haven’t told any of you. Nor any of the others, even those of my own Coven.”

  “Well, out with it!” said Balthazar.

  Basil shot him a glare. Balthazar tried to ignore it, but his ego wouldn’t allow that — not entirely. Basil smiled to himself ever-so-slightly. Ah, so that was the blowhard’s Achille’s heel, was it? He would have to remember that.

  “What else is there to know?” asked Basil.

  “Yeah, come on Dana,” said Giova. “We’re allies, now. You can forget the secrecy. It’s not needed anymore.”

  Dana threw him an odd look. He shrugged his shoulders at her. “Sort of like that,” she said. “The Prophecy says that the Chosen One will sire a Champion, who will lead all Vampires to the dawning of a new age, one in which they needn’t fear the Light. But that’s actually coded language. Your Coven, I think, says that Leonardo Da Vinci postulated three ages of Vampirism on Earth — ”

  “Yes, of course,” said Basil. “It’s one of the teachings we hand down in our Coven. The First Age began when the Atlanteans opened the portal to the Unseelie Realm, the Thirdspace, and the original Vampiric Entities crossed over into the Human world. The Second Age began when da Vinci injected himself and his students with Vampire blood, and they became the first of the Simulacyrica. The nature of the Third Age is . . . unknown. Da Vinci never said what it would be like, but he speculated that it might involve the birth of some new Coven, or some sort of unprecedented unity among the various existing Covens plus some new, unheard-of Coven — along with some sort of new ‘coexistence’ with Humans, without the need to consume their blood — that might not have been possible before or in his time. The Vathias believe that the Third Age is upon us already, and that we live in Spiritual Denial of it.”

  “Yes,” said Dana, nodding. “The dawn of a new age, in which the ‘Light’ is the light of enlightenment. And maybe even literal light, too — the light of the sun. Your formula, Basil . . . your Daywalker serum. If manufactured in large enough quantities, it could change all of our un-lives forever. Even more so if you could adapt it to a genetic therapy. But only once the Covens are unified — if that’s even possible. And only once we can live in peace with Humanity, meaning we no longer have to feed on Humans in order to live. And I don’t see how that’s possible, now. We’re their natural predator, plain and simple, and we always will be. There’s no synthetic substitute for actual human blood. Even your Coven — who I understand lives on animals — even you’ve gone on record as saying that humans are the more efficient food-source.”

  “Well, technically yes,” said Basil. “But — ”

  “Bah!” said Balthazar, beginning to pace back and forth. “Again with all this Prophecy nonsense! It was Vincent’s obsession, and who knows? It might be the very thing that got him killed, the very thing that started this internecine conflict to begin with! It’s about more than that now — of course it is, as wars always find ways of justifying themselves after they’ve started — but if you ask me, that was what lit the flame: Vincent’s pursuit of this ‘Makerless’ Chosen One and her equally Covenless ‘Champion.’ We’d have been better off if that had stayed an obscure footnote in your Coven’s history, Dana. But alas, it’s too late, and now we have to fight for our lives, over a concept that the rest of us originally didn’t need to suffer any loyalty toward!”

  “I think you miss the larger ideal, here, Balthazar,” said Basil, stepping toward him. Balthazar loomed above him, taller than he was, but Basil didn’t let that make a difference. He looked up squarely into Balthazar’s eyes, and addressed him in the calmest, most matter-of-fact tone he could. “The ideal at stake here is not that of belief in nor the pursuit of the Orogrü-Nathr?ks’ Prophecy . . . but belief in the idea that all Vampires, everywhere, are one race, one species, and that an attack on One is an attack on All. The ideal is that we are one people, united, under one banner and in under the flag of one great Nation. And that our purpose is to help one another survive, not kill one another ruthlessly over mere differences of opinion or countervailing ideas. We are — we must be — stronger than that. To be weaker is to sign our own death warrant as a race, as a species; to be weaker is to destroy ourselves, to commit slow, evolutionary suicide. For you and I, for all of us, to die the Eternal Death once and for all. Do you understand?” He paused for a moment. “Well, do you?”

  “I . . . well, I . . .” began Balthazar, clearly taken aback. He licked his lips and swallowed. “Yes. I think I do, at that. But what can we do? I mean, this device you’re building — what good is it? You say it will allow us to channel the power of Orogrü-Nathr?k . . . but to what end? And you said that this device will do exactly as Vynovich wants . . . as in, it can also awaken the fallen god! Why would we want or need to do such a thing? And why take the enormous risk of creating a key to that door, if there’s even the slightest, one-percent chance of Vynovich trying to take it and open it for his own evil purposes?”

  “Well, for one thing, I want him to know how close he came,” said Basil, smiling a humorless smile, “and that his plans were thwarted . . . not just by anyone, but by me, by one of my Coven. The Drogath have, for centuries, hazed, targeted, and bullied the members of my Coven . . . as though our mutual existences have both spanned across nothing but one long, difficult tenure of high-school together. Everywhere we’ve ever turned, the Drogath have been there, mocking us, laughing at us, belittling us, all of us, sometimes in front of the other Covens, and sometimes only for their own amusement. Infantile brutes. Well, I want one of their number — their Leader, this time, who also happens to be the leader of this damnable, slaughterous uprising — to pay for those crimes, once and for all. May all the judgment for his and all his predecessors’ sins fall upon him, and let others judge him for the weight of his own legacy. Let him feel the pain of a fall from grace so severe, that the air-currents whipping past him as he plummets actually catch his skin afire, and burn him to cinders before he hits the ground. Let him taste the Eternal Death, and know in his last moments that it was one of us — one of the Simulacyrica — who dealt him the death-blow. Let the last thing he sees be my face, laughing at him, for a change.”

  “Er, Basil?” said Giova. “You’re, uh, bleeding.”

  “What?” He looked down, and sure enough — he had clenched his fists so tight that blood issued from where his fingernails had cut into his palms. “Oh. Heh. Seems I don’t know my own strength. Did anyone bring any bandages, by any chance? The wound should heal quickly enough, I think, but — ”

  “Yeah but it still looks bad. I think I have some tape,” said Giova, going for one of the suitcases she’d had a ghoul servant bring to her here earlier. “You never know when you’ll need a few of them to help clean-up after a snack.” She opened the suitcase, retrieved the bandages, and wrapped Basil’s hand in them, then used surgical tape to stick them in place.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now, then. What we need to do is start building the devices I’ve designed here. So without further ado . . . let us begin. Tell me, Balthazar: Do you have any experience with electronics?”

  Balthazar sighed, and put his hands in his pockets. The first gesture of humility he had shown. “No, I don’t. Sorry. I’m in auto sales. I work — well, worked, I guess — for Mercedes-Benz of Boston. Not anymore, though. Being able to walk in sunlight is, unfortunately, a requisite for that line of work.”

  Basil nodded. “I see. Dana — you?”

  “Well, some,” she said, a little uncertainty creeping into her voice. “I once had my Amateur Extra ham-radio license, way back in the day. I used to do maintenance on the local repeater and attend the meet-ups of the local ARRL club. It’s been a while, though. But I still know the basics. Mostly.”

  “Well then, that will just have to do,” said Basil. “Come on. I’ve finished the schematics. The second of these devices will help us find the Champion, if he or she even exists yet. And the Champion can then use the first device to defeat Vynovich and his New Cabal . . . Which won’t be easy. Even with the Geist-Verst?rkers in play, Vynovich’s New Cabal still outnumber us greatly, and with Coven Geistig on his side, he has access to basic psionic powers, too — like basic telepathy and telekinesis — and he won’t be afraid to use them on his front lines to screw with us. I’ve a feeling that this — here — will be where we make our next big stand against them. There will be no others to fight if we lose this battle. So this is it, then. Only two pieces of tech between us and total destruction. No pressure, though, right?”

  The others of their party had not yet returned, nor had they checked-in. Basil grew worried — and more than a little pissed off — but, he also knew they could take care of themselves, and didn’t need nursemaiding. Surely, nothing bad or unforeseen could’ve happened to all seven of them in just a couple of hours, right? Not if they had gone armed, as they had, with the Geist-Verst?rker devices and each other. More likely, they had gone of somewhere to get drunk or high, and some were probably knee-deep in orgies with mortals . . . or had fed on said mortals, while knee-deep in orgies. He would never understand the others of his kind, especially the Vathias and their deeply spiritual commitments. There was no worry of dirtying their souls, of course — the condition of Vampirism squarely took care of that little detail all on its own, if you believed in that sort of thing. But rather, it frustrated him that so few of his fellow Vampires — save for a slim majority of his own Coven, the Simulacyrica — felt the need to devote their long, nigh-eternal years to the betterment of Vampire-kind, or even Human-kind, to the pursuit of Truth and of Science, to the romance of stars and atoms, the seductive lure of the harmony of the heavens.

  He carefully placed the batteries in the makeshift metal compartment on the rear of the second device, and then screwed in the last vacuum tube onto the central ring that ran around the perimeter of the main attraction. He re-checked the program-code in the multiple windows he had open on his laptop computer’s screen. Yes, the compile had worked; the driver was now ready, as was the interface. Basil sat back in his chair, and wiped the sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. The air conditioner was on, but small-scale, precision-detail, circuit-level work always exhausted him and made him sweat.

  “There,” he said. “It — they — are finished. They will work as designed, I believe. Now all we need to do is use this” — he gestured toward the smaller device — “to find our Chosen One and her Champion Creation, and this . . .” He laid his hand on the larger device, “to journey into — or harness — the magic and consciousness of the Fallen One. Was a bit difficult pulling these designs from the event horizon surrounding my ass, but nonetheless . . . it is done.”

  “Wow, fairly impressive,” said Giova, eyeing the devices. “I like the aesthetics of these things. They look functional, and intriguing. As though they compel the viewer to touch them and explore their inner-workings.”

  “Well they’re not high-art,” said Basil, “but they’ll do.”

  “Especially this one,” said Balthazar. He picked up the larger device. It looked like a large, leather glove — the kind of glove a large, burly smithy might wear while working at his forge — that Basil had tricked-out with all sorts of machinery: Five large vacuum tubes sat in place of the ends of its fingers, and coiled cables ran from those to yet another thyratron tube mounted to the top of the body of the hand, with more wires and cables leading from that down to the wrist and forearm area, where a large, rotating metal ring sat, with even more vacuum tubes sprouting from equal angles all around its perimeter. The glove also featured several green circuit-boards bolted to it and crammed full of circuitry, tiny clusters of circuits here and there, as well as several small, wire-wrapped transformers and coils pointed in various directions. All the wires and cables all fed from the various pieces of hardware and down toward the wrist, where they snaked into a large wiring-harness and set of sockets clearly designed for a threesome of coaxial-cable connectors. A spool of coaxial cable sat on the table, presumably to connect this “Power Glove” to whatever machines would enable its inventors to commune with Orogrü-Nathr?k. Balthazar put his hand in the glove, trying it on and flexing the glass-and-electrode fingers. “Hmm,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell it does — or how it the hell it does whatever that is — but Giova is correct . . . it’s fairly damned impressive looking, I’ll say that.”

  “Yes, it looks amazing, Basil,” said Dana. “May I see it?”

  “Oh, certainly,” said Balthazar. He took off the heavy, bulky thing and handed it to her. Dana tried it on and flexed the fingers, the glass of the vacuum tubes clinking as they touched.

  “Wow,” she said. “I know it’s probably just an illusion, or something . . . but . . . No. No, wait. It’s not an illusion. Basil . . . this isn’t just a thing of electromechanical beauty. I mean, it is, but. . . Basil, this . . . this isn’t just some piece of ordinary hardware.” He sensed surprise in her voice, and a little awe. “This . . . this is a thing of power,” she went on. “Like . . . Excalibur, or the Holy Grail. Or the Ark of the Covenant. This thing . . . wow. Take it from someone who actually practices a kind of magic . . . This thing has an energy — a dangerous kind of magic — trapped within it. A magic that’s there, waiting, biding its time, just waiting to . . .” She swallowed, and then turned to look him in the eye. “If anything could wake the Fallen One, then this is that thing.” She took it off and gently set it back on the table, then picked up the smaller device. “So. That’s that. Huh. Now what’s this.”

  The other device was the size of a large, almost-ungainly universal remote, the kind you could hook up to your computer and download control codes into. The rectangular device had, on the front and at the top, a large, old-fashioned brass gauge that read “PER-CENT POWER.” Beneath that, it had a multi-barred digital read-out, sort of like an audio Equalizer, and beneath that, it had a circuit-board, what looked like a large, green-and-white oscilloscope screen, and a real oddity: The guts, arms, and front-facing-plate of an overlarge pocket-watch, but with six needle-like arms instead of three. The arms moved constantly from place to place, ticking and rocking back and forth over the numbers, which Basil had, for some reason, replaced with a series of emojis and icons — things like a key, a house; a crescent moon, a wolf; a tea-cup, a flower, a lightning bolt. . . a total of thirty-nine symbols in all. The six needle-like hands of the cannibalized pocket-watch whooshed back and forth between the symbols, lightning on none of them, just cruising past them endlessly. Sprouting out of the device’s top came a pair of “bunny ears” television antennae.

  “This,” said Basil, “is what I call a Khaototronometer. It . . . well, what it does is complicated. Think of it like this. Time is a river that flows. And in that river, there are eddies, currents, and whirlpools . . . places, events, points at which fate, chance, and destiny all converge in a nontrivial way . . . where the confluence of events is either so serendipitous as to be unbelievable, or so calamitous as to be apocalyptic, catastrophic. This device detects the proximity of those events, those points, in space and time. Tells us how close we are to them.”

  “I take back what I said,” said Giova. “The other one doesn’t seem so amazing now.”

  “Indeed,” said Balthazar. “I wish I’d had something like that to sniff out potential sales opportunities back at the lot. I would’ve made a lot more money.”

  “Thank you,” said Basil, and smiled at him. Maybe he had been wrong about Balthazar. He seemed made of better stuff than Basil had first assumed. Since he’d confronted him earlier, he seemed to act with greater humility, and not so much boorish bravado and bombast . . . nor did he give him as much lip as he had before. That was good. Maybe he was good at this leadership stuff, after all. It remained to be seen, though, if the others would fall in line, as well . . . thus far, they didn’t seem to either like or respect him much. He would have to work on that. Provided they ever came back from carousing around the con, that was.

  But hey — wait. Wait just a goddamn minute, here. He was in charge, not them! They had elected him leader. And if he said to get back here, then goddamn it, they’d better obey.

  Before he’d sat down to design the equipment, he’d programmed all their cell-phone numbers into his own phone. So, he got out his phone, and dialed the first number he came across: Trazeal.

  “Hello?” Trazeal answered. He could hear the sounds of music and laughter in the background. People shouting, the sound of dice rolling on tabletops. The shuffle of paper. “Basil, is that you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s me. I need you back here, Trazeal. I need you all back here. It’s time to go hunting for the Chosen One and her Creation. Starting with the hallways of this con.”

  “Well, I’ve been lookin’ around for other Vampires, Boss, but I can’t seem to find — ”

  “Just get back here,” said Basil. “I have a better way of finding them. And get the others, too, wherever they are. Are we clear?”

  Trazeal sighed a resigned sigh. “Yes. Clear as crystal. Be back up there in twenty minutes or so, soon as I find everybody.” The phone clicked in Basil’s ear.

  “Way to go,” said Giova, putting a hand on his shoulder. “See? They do respect you. They’re just stressed out right now. All of them. Me too. Same goes for Balthazar and Dana here. We’re all of us frightened and on edge. We’re being hunted by over half of our own kind, and we never know where they’ll turn up next looking for us. We look to you for guidance. And if you don’t have confidence in yourself, how then can we have confidence in you . . . or in the idea that we’ll somehow survive this?”

  Basil sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. “You’re right, of course. You’re absolutely right. Well. One thing I am confident in — these machines will work. They will do as I’ve designed them to. I’m confident that the Khaototronometer will lead us right to the Chosen One and the Champion.”

  “What makes you so sure they’re even here?” asked Balthazar. “You didn’t speak of this when you arrived . . . nor did any of your Covenspeople who contacted any of us. You just sort of . . . assumed it to be true and started work on these devices. Why?”

  “Because, the words of the Prophecy,” said Basil. “And I quote: ‘She indulges her fantasies, disdains the real . . . for therein, she has few, if any, friends. Like a certain doctor who is not a doctor, she believes that intellect and romance will always triumph over brute force and cynicism. Knows much about science and the arts. A loner, but a consummate lover.’ That’s a summation of practically every person here, Balthazar. If I ever heard an exact summation of what ‘geek culture’ is or ever was all about, in general, then that’s it, right there in a nutshell, with apologies to late-show host Craig Ferguson.”

  “Oh him,” said Dana. “Yeah, totally one of us.”

  “Really?” asked Basil. “Craig Ferguson, a Vampire? One of the Orogrü-Nathr?ks?”

  “Yep.”

  “Huh,” said Basil. “Y’know, that makes an odd kind of sense, in a way. But, anyhow. Yes, I believe she’s here if she’s anywhere this week. If she’s passionate about science fiction or fantasy, or is the sort to indulge in the idea of dreams taking on lives of their own — or any such stuff as that — then she’ll be here. You can pretty much count on it. She’s around here — somewhere. We will find her, and her Champion. If, of course, he even exists yet.”

  Just then, his cell phone rang. He picked it up and answered. “Er, hello?”

  “Yes, Basil? It’s me . . .” came Trazeal’s voice on the other end. “Listen, we’ve, er, managed to bump into somebody we think you might want to meet . . .”

  The trench-coated, pale-faced Mystikite and the green-skinned, witch-hat-wearing Elphion walked the fourth-floor hallway of the Renaissance Regency holding hands, as if they had known each other all their lives and had not just met thirty minutes beforehand at a room-party.

  “So — is it okay if we talk smalltalk while we look for a decent spot to make-out and for you to suck on my neck?” asked Elphion.

  “Uh . . . sure, I guess so . . .” said Mystikite. He had always believed very strongly in never taking advantage of someone when they were drunk. The rules regarding people who were, most likely, certifiably insane were a little less clear.

  “So what do you do for a living?” she asked. “Well, okay, weird choice of words. But you get the idea.”

  “Actually, Vampires — real ones — aren’t ‘dead’ at all,” he said. “You oughta know that if we’re your hobby.”

  “Of course I know that,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “It was a joke, you dunce.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Sorry. To answer your question, I’m a software engineer, system administrator, and network specialist. I’m an independent contractor who works, at least for now, for Mjolnir Propulsion Systems. And possibly also for an outfit headed-up by CEO Walter Weatherspark’s daughter, Desirée Weatherspark. But I’m fairly certain that that second part is classified, above top secret, so please don’t let anyone know that I told you.”

  Elphion giggled. “Eh, right. I Promise.”

  “No, I’m serious . . . I could get in seriously deep trouble for even saying her name out loud.”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t worry. I keep secrets fairly well.”

  “Yeah, but you’re also a writer. I know what that means. It means that anything that anybody says or does within ear- or eye-shot of you is fair game for future story-material. I’m hip to your wicked schemes, you see.”

  “Ah, yes. I am a wicked witch, after all,” she said, and laughed.

  “Yeah, but you’re not in your natural home of the West right now. Right now you’re over here on the East Coast, so your powers should theoretically weaken somewhat. As should your evilness and wickedness. Just watch out for falling houses from Kansas.”

  “I always wondered about that,” said Elphion. “If the tornado picked up the house and flung it to Oz, then what kind of weather must’ve brought the balloon with the Mystikite in it? We saw in Oz The Great And Powerful that it was a similar storm that did it, right? Well, if that’s the case, then it’s conceivable that both events together would’ve made the Ozians curious about our world, so naturally, they might want to come and explore. So if Oz is a real place — which Oz The Great And Powerful certainly made clear that it is — then why couldn’t Dorothy’s friends come and see her? Why wasn’t some form of inter-world travel developed? Why wasn’t Oz assimilated — or conquered and colonized — by the USA or the USSR, with an invading army of houses and hot-air balloons? It’s all very complicated, once you consider the relative closeness of the two worlds, and the fact that time seems to work differently in each one.”

  “Hey. D’you know something?” asked Mystikite.

  “Er, what? Sorry if I just sounded like a huge geek just now. Literature and movies — particularly fantasy — are kinda my thing.”

  “Uh, have you not noticed we’re at a sci-fi and fantasy convention?” he said, and laughed — it felt good to laugh, he thought, and felt as though he hadn’t done so in quite some time, even though he knew it had only been a few hours — “Besides, that’s what I loved about it. You totally just geeked out on me, and it was cool.” He stopped walking and bent double with pain, suddenly, as his stomach — or whatever internal anatomy he possessed that resembled one — clenched tightly and felt like it spasmed, the hunger clawing at him again. He abruptly felt weak, fatigued, as though he couldn’t take another step without falling over in his tracks. His eyelids grew heavy, and the air grew cold — damn cold — as a shiver passed through him. “I think — ” he began, then licked his lips, “I think I need to eat . . . uh . . . like, right now.”

  “Come on,” she said, looking left, then right. The hallway was almost deserted, save for a few people already up and awake, and prowling around looking for the hotel’s continental breakfast bar. Elphion took him by the hand and they retreated to a corner, near an unmarked door that led to a broom closet. Elphion tried the knob, and miracle of miracles, the door popped open. She led him inside. There in the shadows — for his preternatural vision allowed him better eyesight in the dark than any mortal could ever hope for — he watched as she took out a switchblade knife and ran its edge along the side of her neck, producing a font of blood along the light incision she made there. She put the knife away, cupped her hand around the back of his head, and then whispered, “Now, go on, do it. Drink. I don’t call myself Elphion Dangerzone for nothing. Go on. Do it. You know you need to in order to live.”

  For a moment, he hesitated, as she grew closer and closer, and pressed her body up against his. The soft warmth of her flesh upon his own, the intoxicating smell of her perfume, the firmness of her breasts pushing against his chest, the smell and softness of her hair . . . and the tenderness of her neck . . . yes, that especially, her neck, so tender and pink, and beneath it, he could see the veins . . . the arteries . . . pumping, pulsating with the precious nectar of life itself as it coursed through them, sluicing through every inch of her body, a life-giving river of delicious crimson.

  Vampires could eat regular food — he didn’t know how he knew this; he simply did — but could derive only a tiny amount of nourishment from it. No, his mainstay, his greatest source of vitality and strength, would come from this stuff, the stuff of life — or rather, the stuff of other peoples’ lives — forever after this, now. He gave himself a mental moment of silence. After this, there could be no going back. Hell, there was no going back anyway, he thought, but this . . . this sealed it. This was the part of the map beyond which “there be dragons.” With this ritual, that of feasting on human blood, he became well and truly damned . . . even if there was no God to do the damning. No, he would no God would damn him, but the universe itself would, as a thing not meant to exist — at least, not in this world. A single tear leaked from his left eye as he tried to fight the rest of them from assaulting his face. In the end, he grimaced, the emotional torment overtaking him just as the hunger flared-up inside him again, both overpowering him at once. Then, a furious fit of pique exploded in his chest, and he could stand it no longer.

  He bit down into her flesh, and felt her hand cupping his head grip him tightly, her other hand, the one that held his, clenching tight, almost into a fist as she grunted and whimpered a bit, then groaned . . . whether in pleasure or in pain, he couldn’t be sure, because at the moment, he got lost in a near-infinite void of nirvana. He drank, letting the blood splash against his teeth and tongue, letting it wash away the thirst, like the apotheosis of all ocean waves crashing over and drowning the sands of the apotheosis of all deserts. He staggered on his feet as he suckled her wound and drank deeper, swallowing the crimson liquid in hurried gulps, some of it dribbling down his cheek and his chin, but he cared little for table manners at the moment; the divine rapture of the feast flooded his nervous system with fire and lightning, dopamine and endorphins; he felt as though he flew, his feet leaving the ground as though levitating, his whole body thrumming, pulsating with some arcane form of energy that radiated inward as well as outward. His head swam, and he felt a bit dizzy as he reluctantly let go of Elphion and stumbled, then caught himself against the wall of the closet, trying to make the rest of the world stop spinning. He dropped to one knee, and tried to steady himself. Dear gods, what a rush! No earthly-pleasure he had ever sampled could ever equal what he had just experienced, none! Not even sex was that good!

  For a brief moment, he saw that Elphion’s eyes had closed and that her head lolled to one side, and he panicked, thinking, Oh God no, please don’t let me have killed her . . . please, oh please don’t let her be dead . . .

  A second later, she lolled her head to the other side and smiled, emitting a satisfied moan under her breath. Until that moment, Mystikite had never realized just how Gadget had always felt whenever he’d suffered one of his sudden-onset panic attacks. Now he did know, and it terrified him, as well as gave him a whole new perspective on Gadget’s struggle with mental illness. He filed that away for later, though, and looked into her eyes. He didn’t know what else to say except —

  “Thank . . . you . . . Lynn . . . Elphion . . . God, thank you . . . so much,” he panted, gasping for breath as his heart and lungs pumped furiously, working overtime. He looked up, and Elphion smiled down at him. She ran a gentle hand through his hair, then reached up and into that same pocket on her dress, and pulled out a pad of gauze and some medical tape. Apparently, she had come prepared for this. A little unnerving, but still, maybe understandable, for it looked as though this had been on her agenda all along. Had it not been him, it would’ve been some other Vampire . . . someone who might have drained her completely, and maybe killed her in the process. She carefully dressed and bandaged the wound in her neck, and Mystikite, still fumbling from the overwhelming blast of endorphins released into his system, tried to help her attach the gauze and firmly tape it in place. “There,” he said. “That should do it. You might wanna sterilize that wound soon, though. Make sure it doesn’t get infected, or . . . or anything.”

  “Right,” she said, nodding. She sighed a contented sigh, and then said, “So. You wanna maybe wander around the con together? See the sights a while before we . . . y’know . . . head to bed with each other?”

  “Uh . . . um, okay . . . I guess . . .” he said, a sudden pang of guilt going through him as he immediately thought of Buffy. “You do move pretty fast, you know that?”

  She shrugged. “Once a year, I come here with one goal. To have fun. The kind of fun I can’t have the rest of the year . . . the kind of fun I can only have with my people. People like you. People who understand me, people who grok what it’s like to be weird — and to love being weird.” She shook her head. “I move fast ‘cause if I didn’t, the con would be over before I made a move. Outside the magical barrier that surrounds this place, I’m shy and withdrawn and a total introvert. Here, though, here I’m powerful. Here, I’m sensual. Here, I see what I want and I reach for it and take it. I can’t do that anywhere else. So, yeah. Let’s wander around a little, and then head back to my room . . . and get to ‘know’ each other in the Biblical sense. Sound good?”

  “Um, yeah, it does, actually,” he said, and smiled a little, still uneasy at the thought of cheating on Buffy. Wait — was it cheating? Were they broken-up, now? Or were they still together? He didn’t know. Wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going back yet or not. Maybe, if he went back, they could work things out together. Maybe he and Gadget, and Buffy, could all sit down and talk . . . though none of that would change what Jetta had turned him into at their urging, now would it? No, it wouldn’t. Nothing could change that. “Let’s go,” he said to Elphion. She took his hand, their fingers intertwined, and with his other hand, he opened the broom closet and they exited, back into the light once more, and began to walk down the hallway together. More people had awakened, and were up wandering around.

  “So, what brings you to con this year, Mystikite?’” asked Elphion. “Are you a regular, or are you a con-virgin?”

  “Oh, hells no,” he said. “I’m so not a con-virgin. This’ll be my fifth year in a row. Me and my friends . . . well, we had a falling out recently, so I guess my former friends . . . though we might reconcile sometime in the future . . . Hell, I dunno . . . We usually come here together, the three of us, and we try to have a pretty good time. My friend Terry — we all call him Gadget — he’s . . . well, he’s kind of special, but we love him anyway. My girl — my ex-girlfriend, Buffy — well, that’s her ‘nym; her real name is Zoe; yeah, no shit, just like in The Hitchhiker’s Guide, for real — she helps me look after him. We think he’s met a girl this year he really likes, but I think she’s dangerous.”

  “Well, why don’t you go check up on him? See if he’s okay?”

  Mystikite sighed. “I would. But. I kind of stormed off in a huff earlier, and you really shouldn’t waste a good huff like that. It was a pretty good storm-off, too, and you shouldn’t waste those, either. I was — still am, somewhat — angry with them. All of them.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for starters, they turned me into a fucking Vampire! Or at least, they pretty much gave the Vampire we hung with permission to do so!”

  “Ah, I see. The flaw in your logic,” said Elphion, “is that Vampires don’t need or want or ‘ask’ permission to do anything. Even the ones you think are your friends. They pretty much just do what they want, and if any mortals get in the way, well, fuck ‘em, they’re considered collateral damage. She might’ve asked for their blessing, but trust me, she had probably planned on doing it anyway.”

  “But — why? What possible purpose of hers could that have served?”

  “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” said Elphion, giving him a strange look and a half-smile. “You’re an extremely attractive guy, Mystikite. Plus, you’re genuinely nice, and women like that. She probably did it for he most obvious reason of all — to have you all to herself.”

  “But Jetta and I can’t stand each other,” he said. “We broke up years ago.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “Methinks someone wants you back in a big way, and just won’t admit it to herself,” said Elphion. “In which case . . .” She unlinked her fingers from his. “In which case we ought to stick to being just friends. You’re someone else’s territory, and I don’t want to go up against a jealous Vampire. That’s a good way to get yourself killed, right there.”

  “But what if I don’t want Jetta? What if I don’t want another Vampire?” He took a step closer to her. “What if I wanna hang with you? And get to know you better? Both, er, casually and . . . er, ‘Biblically?’”

  Elphion smiled. “I guess I’m honored. But of course, you realize that any love we share is therefore tragic and doomed from the get-go. You’re immortal, and I’m not. That means that one of us ages, grows old, and dies. The other one . . . well, the other one doesn’t, and has to watch as the other one succumbs, while they stay young and handsome.”

  “Aw, come on,” he said, and smiled his most dashing smile. “Listen. We just met, dated, got married, grew old, and one of us died, all in the space of a minute and some change. I can move with Vampiric super-speed, but man, even I know that was a ludicrously fast progression of events. Can’t we take things just a little bit slower than that? I was maybe thinking maybe some coffee and some cinnamon roles, for starters.” He offered her his hand again, and implored her with his eyes.

  She grinned back at him and nodded, and took his hand in hers. “Sure. Cinnamon roles and coffee sound good.”

  “Well then let’s go down to the hotel cafeteria and grab some. Whadda ya say?”

  “I say we should go pillage the cafeteria.”

  “How right you are.” And so, they walked down the hall together, holding hands and smiling. He thought of the early days of him and Buffy, when they’d first started dating. He couldn’t help it; the resemblance was there. A pang of guilt rippled through Mystikite, but then, for some reason, it faded; he blinked, having felt it, but then stopped, and questioned it. Wait a second. Why are you so worried about what Buffy or Gadget think or feel? You can do what you want, dude. It’s your life — all of it, all the unhallowed centuries you’ll be alive, now, thanks to Buffy and Gadget and Jetta — so why not make the most of it, the most of right now? Stop thinking about them, and start thinking about yourself, for a change. Don’t worry about hurting Buffy . . . she didn’t worry about how you’d feel when you awoke as a Vampire, did she? Nope. No, she didn’t. So why not? Why not see if this leads to some new kind of happiness, at least for right now, this moment? You can always go back if you change your mind, and no one has to know.

  There then came a further, and deeper, pang of guilt — this one almost physical — and this time, it concerned Gadget. He wasn’t entirely sure that Gadget could make it on his own without him there to look after him, help him, guide him. Then again, Gadget still had Buffy there with him, didn’t he? And she knew how to take care of him just as well as he did, right? He’d be alright until Mystikite decided to return . . . if he ever did . . . wouldn’t he? He wasn’t that dependent on others for his emotional stability . . . was he? Mystikite hoped not. It struck him that he worried more about how Gadget would deal with his absence than he did about how Buffy would handle it. And how would this — all of this — affect things when the lot of them went up against their extraterrestrial foe at the con? They still had that thing to face-down and destroy, if they could. Oh shit, he thought, that’s right. Will they be strong enough without me? Shit, I really shouldn’t have left. Had he abandoned them, all of them, new friends as well as old, for petty, selfish reasons, right in their hour of greatest need? Was he actually the one who had behaved wrongly, here? Was he the one who had been weak, instead of remaining strong for his friends, and had retreated from them as though they had intentionally wounded him, when clearly, that had not been their intent? He didn’t want these thoughts; no, not just now. He had found a temporary respite from all the sudden-onset existential angst he’d felt, a nice little oasis in the center of the desert in Elphion, and he didn’t want to spoil it by hauling in his leftover emotional baggage from before. Especially when said baggage brought him down from on high and made him feel guilty, ashamed; wrong, and judged for it, and ostracized. . . even if he had been the one to do that last part to himself. He tried to push the thoughts away, to shove them out of his head, but they put up a nasty fight, their barbed thorns sticking into him whenever he tried to upbraid them; they stayed there like weeds, which, refusing to be dug-up, had tangled themselves in the roots of his mind and conscience, and now had a strangle-hold on his soul.

  Just then, as they went around the next corner, they ran into company: A group of what looked like some very serious Vampire cosplayers. At least, that’s what they appeared to be, right up until the moment that Elphion let go of his hand, grabbed her forehead, and cried out in pain, stumbling a few steps backward.

  “Mystikite — oh god — !” she cried, “my head, it’s — !”

  “Elphion? What — ?” he asked. His eyes went to the cosplayers. Wait a second. If Elphion’s psychic talent is going all psycho-ballistic on her, then that must mean that these aren’t cosplayers . . . They’re actual Vampires. Other, actually-real Vampires, like Jetta. Like me. “Oh, shit,” he said, and backed up a few paces, raising his hands in a gesture of peace as the other Vampires glared at him, sizing him up. “Uh, hey, listen, guys . . . gals . . . we don’t want any trouble, here . . . in fact, we don’t want anything. Nope, nothin’ at all. Matter of fact, we’re on our way outta here, y’see. So, sorry if we . . . got in your way, or anything. Totally our fault. Totally. We’ll just be going now . . .” He smiled, and turned to leave. “Hey, Elphion, let’s — ”

  “And who might you be?” asked the Vampire in the lead, a muscled male wearing a chain-male haubergeon. “You have a Human companion, but you are not of Coven Vathias. I know all of my Covenspeople in this city, and I’ve never seen you. Who are you.”

  “Yes, who are you,” demanded the sexy female Vampire in the red, sequined evening gown. “Are you Drogath?” She paused, and took a step back. “Kravenscryln?” The device on top of her head, a blinking, glowing torus-like machine, lit up suddenly. Mystikite felt his arms suddenly “magnetize” to his sides, and he cried out in surprise as his feet left the ground and he levitated into the air, as did Elphion, who yelped in surprise as well, her arms similarly bound.

  “What the fuck is going on!” he cried. “Who are you people! What’s a Cray-ven-skrill-enn!”

  “Kravenscryln!” corrected Elphion from where she floated. “It’s a Vampire Coven!”

  “He doesn’t seem hostile, Trazeal,” said one of the twin Vampires dressed in what looked like martial-arts robes, who also had one of the devices on his head. “Maybe he’s just a Covenless. He’s not one of the Orogrü-Nathr?ks, I’ll tell you that.”

  “If he is,” said the thin, male Vampire wearing a sharp business suit, “we should kill him on-sight! Covenless Vampires, especially now, in these times, are risks we cannot afford to have running around!”

  “No, wait!” The female vampire dressed in a leather trench coat, with a sword strapped to her back, stepped forward. “Put him down, Ripley! Put them both down! This could be him!”

  “Him who?” asked the one in the red dress — presumably named Ripley. “Vivacia, what are you talking about?”

  “The one Basil is looking for,” said the one in the trench coat. “The Champion. He’s supposed to be a Covenless Vampire!”

  “I demand that you assholes put me down!” cried Mystikite. “Let me go! Let us go!”

  “Mystikite, what the fuck is going on?” yelled Elphion.

  “Are you sure?” said the one wearing the haubergeon, seeming to think as he stared at Mystikite, studying him. “He seems weak and uncertain of himself. Not exactly ‘Champion’ material, if you ask me.” He turned and addressed Mystikite. “Tell us. What is your name.”

  “Mystikite!” he cried. “Mystikite Schmidinger! My friends call me Mystikite! Mystikite McKraken! It’s the name of the guy who invented D&D and the name of a really old video-game character put together to form a weird pseudonym! I came up with it about six years ago!”

  “Hmm,” said the one called Ripley, “I’m not convinced.” It was her turn to try and talk to him. “When. When were you made. Into a Vampire.”

  “Earlier tonight! By my ex-girlfriend, Jetta!” he said. “Jetta Blackthorne! Why? Do you know her, or something?”

  The one named Ripley and the one named Trazeal turned to look at each other. “It is him,” said Trazeal. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Amazing,” said Ripley.

  Mystikite felt his arms loose from his sides and he levitated back down from in the air, and his feet once more touched the ground, as did Elphion’s.

  “Jesus!” he cried. “What is wrong with you people! Who are you, anyway!”

  “My name is Trazeal,” said the one in the haubergeon. He gave a short bow. “And you, Mystikite McKraken, are someone we have been searching for.”

  Mystikite and Elphion exchanged a look. She shrugged. “I got nothin’,” she said, shaking her head. She gripped his arm tightly and whispered: “Please do something. I’m scared . . . and now I have a headache . . . and I don’t want to die here!”

  “Alright, look,” said Mystikite, turning to the other Vampires, raising his hands in a gesture of peace. “You guys have obviously gotten me confused with somebody else. I’m nobody special, alright? I’m just a freelance software engineer who works for a defense department contractor. Which sounds shady, I admit. But. It’s nothing spectacular or especially significant, insofar as folks of, er, your guys’ — er — persuasion — and I guess, mine now too — might be concerned. If you get what I mean. So if you’ll just let me and my girlfriend here go — okay? — I promise you, we will make not make any trouble for you guys. Swear to god, we will cause you zero problems. None. Zip. Nada. Just . . . let us pass . . . okay?”

  “Amazing . . . and very sad,” said the female trench-coated Vampire, Vivacia, shaking her head disapprovingly and chuckling under her breath. “A Vampire who prefers the company of Humans because he is afraid of his fellow Vampires. Some Champion.”

  “Champion?” asked Mystikite. “Who’s she talking about?”

  “You,” said Ripley. “You are our Champion. The one we have been searching for, who fulfills the prophecy of Les Orogrü-Nathr?ks.”

  “Lay On Fonts, Dee what?” He blinked. “Lady, are you on crack by any chance?”

  “It’s French,” said Elphion. “It means ‘The Children of Orogrü-Nathr?k.’ Their deity, a fallen Elder God.”

  “A fallen . . . uh-huh . . .” He then did a double-take. “And they think I’m — that I — I’m the one who fulfills some prophecy?” His voice shot up an octave and he pointed to himself, his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline.

  “Yes,” said Ripley, stepping toward him. “You are the one. We are certain of it. Your lineage proves it.”

  “Oh so I have a lineage now,” said Mystikite. “A minute ago I was a worthless ‘Covenless’ who needed to be killed. Why the hell do you guys just up and fucking murderize Vampires who don’t belong to a Coven? That’s fucking harsh, dude. Don’t you people have any appreciation for orphans? Jesus, it’s like you’ve never seen any superhero movies. Peter Parker, Bruce Mystikite, Kal-El . . . all orphans. Earth’s mightiest heroes, every one of ‘em with cryptic heritages, at best. And yet, they’ve saved the world, multiple times.”

  He knew he was babbling, but fuck it, he didn’t care. These could be his last moments on Earth.

  “Mystikite . . .” warned Elphion. “Be careful.”

  “Forgive my . . . associate, Gnarl,” said Ripley. “He is a bit . . . overzealous. Allow me to explain. the Orogrü-Nathr?ks are a Coven of Vampires. There are thirteen such Covens, seven of which are currently at war with the other six. And years ago, the Orogrü-Nathr?ks made a prophecy . . . that a Chosen One would come, and that she would Maker progeny; a Champion, one who would lead our kind out of darkness and to a new enlightenment. Things . . . happened . . . and we were given a name. Your friend, Jetta. Her name. You are the Champion spoken of in the Orogrü-Nathr?ks’ prophecies.”

  “Huh,” said Mystikite. “Funny. I don’t feel like anyone’s Champion.”

  “I wonder if . . .” said Ripley to Trazeal. “I wonder if Basil’s invention will let me look into his mind. To see his story.”

  Trazeal shrugged. “You might as well try.”

  “Mystikite — or do you prefer Mystikite?” asked Ripley.

  “Uh, Mystikite is fine,” said Mystikite.

  “Mystikite, then. I would like to touch your face. Is that alright?”

  “Uh, my face?” he said, and blinked. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  The woman in the gown — Ripley — smiled. She reached out and put her fingers to Mystikite’s temple. He recoiled briefly, and she paused, but once he realized — oh, she isn’t going to hurt me; she just wants to do some kind of freaky, Vampiric, Vulcan-mind-meld on me — he let out a held breath and let her touch him.

  “Mystikite!” hissed Elphion. “No! Don’t let her touch you!”

  “It’s okay, Elphion,” he said. “I think I understand what she’s doing.” He felt a light tingle in the skin where her fingers touched his face, and then his vision blurred slightly, then returned to normal. And then, he could . . . feel her, in his mind. It was like having someone shuffle back and forth through your thoughts as though through the songs on a playlist. The physical sensation was one of vertigo, of getting yanked forward and then backward really fast, as though on a motorized zip-line. He was suddenly not in control of his own thought-stream; he thought of Gadget, and Buffy; of Dizzy, and of Misto, and of Dizzy’s team; of Jetta, and of what it had felt like to be made into a Vampire. And of the alien, and their fight with it. Ripley looked perplexed at that. He thought of Mjolnir, and the work he did there. Then of his childhood, and of growing up with his abusive parents, and of running away after high school . . . he tried to resist the flow of memories, tried to steer himself away from remembering things he didn’t want to . . . tried to turn away from things he would rather not see again, things he wasn’t proud of nor wanted in his life. But he couldn’t look away, no matter how much he wanted to. He resented the woman in front of him for putting him through this.

  Then, she broke contact, and it was over. He was left breathing heavily, and sweating.

  “Jesus!” he breathed. “What the fuck did you just do to me!”

  “He is a dreamer of big dreams,” said Ripley, taking a step back from him. “A fantasist. The kind of man to see the contents of a person’s dreams as a mark of their character in general. He believes that the world is not doomed, so long as people have five things — hope, a sense of self-discipline, logic, compassion, and, most importantly, imagination. Deep within him, though, what he is mostly is a Lost Boy . . . one who refuses to grow up all the way, because all grown-ups are pirates and there lies madness, or so he believes. And now, he’s happy . . . because now, he doesn’t have to. He can be a Lost Boy forever now. Yes, forever and ever. He’s glad to be rid of the obligation to mature beyond his present state. As for the one who Made him . . . Yes. It is her. The Chosen One. I can feel her inside him, the part of herself that was torn off . . . and placed within him when she Made him.”

  “Hey! Watch it, lady,” he said — on the outside, at least. “There’s more than that to who I am. You don’t even know me, alright?”

  But on the inside, he thought: Shit, is any of that really true? Did he resent the idea of growing up, of maturing beyond who he was, right now? Was that why he hadn’t gone to college, like Zoe or Terry? Was that why he stayed a freelancer, never signing with a company for keeps? Was that why he’d been afraid to marry Zoe? Because it would force him to grow up in ways he wasn’t ready for, yet? Was this the reason he still listened to the same music as he had back then, and still loved the same movies, cartoons, TV shows, and comic books as he had then, too?

  Maybe, for him, it wasn’t just nostalgia . . . maybe he lived in a time that no longer existed. Maybe he lived in a remembered life he had artificially prolonged well-beyond its expiration date . . . Maybe it was time to pull the plug on the past, and think about embracing a future, if not the future . . . except that now, he couldn’t do that. Why?

  Well, because now, he had no future in the mortal world. That option had been cruelly yanked away from him, as now he could not walk in sunlight, nor could he live on normal food . . . unless it came on legs and had a heartbeat and a life of its own that was precious and sacred. So what was he to do? He was a murdering predator with no real future, and only a half-real past that could no longer serve him now that he saw how tawdry and cobwebbed it really had become. So what did that leave? It left whatever Vampires offered, that’s what; whatever chance at a meaningful existence they — and his new friend Elphion — came bearing. He decided he would take it, whatever it was.

  “You will come with us, now,” said Ripley. “You and your Human friend. You will come with us to meet our new Leader. He’s . . . anxious to meet you. He’s been searching for you and your Maker, you see. Speaking of whom: Your Maker . . . is she here with you? At this convention?”

  “Uh, no, not right now,” said Mystikite. “I mean — not right now, but she will be soon, most likely. She’ll probably show up, her and the rest of my friends, who I ran away from because, well, they’re all Human — except for her, of course — and thus, they’re not safe around me anymore, because . . . well, because of what I am now. One of you people. I . . . can’t trust myself not to hurt any of them.” From beside him, Elphion gave him a concerned, pitying look. He wished she wouldn’t. “So yeah, she’ll show up, eventually,” he finished, with a sigh. “With them in-tow, most likely, including my recently-ex-girlfriend. So I’ll have to deal with that when it happens, too. And oh yeah: When my friends show up? They’ll probably — I mean, there’s a chance — that one seriously pissed-off extraterrestrial entity — one that wants all of us dead way worse than the Emperor wanted Luke to join the Dark Side — will probably follow them here.”

  “Ripley,” said the Vampire in the black trench-coat — Vivacia, was that her name? — “we need to tell Basil about that and I mean now. Like, stat.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Ripley, “I agree. Come on you two. Follow us.”

  “And where are we going, again?” asked Elphion.

  “Yeah, where, exactly?” said Mystikite, taking a wary step away from Ripley as she reached out for his hand.

  “To our suite, our room,” she said. “To meet the Leader of the Rebellion against the New Cabal. In other words, to meet the one who now leads what remains of a little less than half of the once-great Vampire Nation.”

  “I must call Basil,” said Trazeal. “We don’t want to just walk in and surprise him with this.” He took out his cell-phone and dialed a number. “Yes, Basil? It’s me . . . Listen, we’ve, er, managed to bump into somebody we think you might want to meet . . .”

  Mystikite and Elphion exchanged a momentary, meaningful look. She gripped his hand tight, and then held on as he sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and then, together, they set off after the eight-some of Vampires, with Ripley in the lead. It was clear that wherever he went, Elphion would follow. Funny — they’d just met, and already, they were inseparable. He could not tell if that was good, or bad. Probably bad. She was Human, after all, and he was a Vampire. Precisely the reason he had left Zoe behind with the others. His Human friends were not — could not be — considered safe in his company anymore. Especially for Zoe’s sake.

  Was he not now going down a similar road, this time with someone he’d only met a half-hour earlier? He supposed he was. But at least Elphion seemed to know what she had signed up for; she seemed to hold no romanticized notions cross-wired into her brain through years of Vampire-lifestyling. Gods, he felt so horrible about that. For years, he and Zoe had pretended to be Vampires. They had acted out the rituals, the gothic romantic melodrama, put on the costumes and role-played their favorite characters from all of Vampire fiction . . . they had worked the motifs into their sex-play . . . they had tasted each other’s blood. His doing. His fault. His big lie to her. And now that he was one . . .

  That was all over. And it was over because now, he was very much a real Vampire, and Zoe was . . . well, she was still a Human. It wasn’t fun, or playtime, or a lark, or a joke anymore. If he ever bit into her, it wouldn’t be in the spirit of make-believe or pretend or any sexy-fun-times. No. It would be in the spirit of death. Her death. It would probably be in the spirit of Elphion’s death too, sooner or later. Either from his fangs, or from the fangs of some other Vampire whom she invited to feast on her, for the rush of coming so close to dying but then jerking back suddenly, quickly granted a reprieve from her ultimate fate . . . if the Vampire in question was in a charitable mood. Thus, she was in need of protection — from now on, from hereafter ’til whenever. So, he added that to his list of “meaningful” things to do with his now-forever lifespan.

  One — be whatever this group of Vampires needed him to be; their “Champion,” whatever the hell that was, or meant. Two — when Gadget and Dizzy and the other “Technowizards” showed up, apologize for leaving and then join-in their crusade, and use his Vampiric powers to help them defeat the alien invader . . . then afterward, disappear from their lives, once and for all. The hardest part of that would to say goodbye to Gadget for the last time.

  But for the boy’s own good — for his safety — it had to be done. It had to. And finally — protect Elphion from here on out, as part of his “new life” among his fellow Vampires, his fellow Creatures of Darkness. If that meant running with this crowd, plus Jetta, then he supposed he would have to just grin and bear it, and learn to make new friends whenever and wherever he could. There had to be Vampires who liked Dungeons & Dragons, right? And so long as he kept up with the pace with the other software developers at work . . . well, who really cared if he telecommuted at night, instead of during the day? All of this was imminently doable. Yes. At least he thought so.

  Except the part about saying goodbye to Gadget. That was going to hurt worse than silver bullets and worse than any fire.

  Darmok opened her eyes, and gasped. There she sat, dressed in her crimson duster and her poly-alloy soft-weave clothing, cross-legged in a meditation pose on the roof of The Renaissance Regency Hotel, facing the Zarcturean ship, her own ship behind her and cloaked. Only now, a cross-section of the lower half of the Visitor’s ship’s hull wavered and blurred, as though a special effects technician somewhere tinkered with its image. Then, that part of it simply “melted” into a vertically-aligned, circular pool of what looked like gravity-defying liquid mercury . . . which then transformed into what looked like a portal made of blue-tinted, glimmering seawater that some kind of rainbow-hued, opal-colored light shined through from some other place. A metal walkway extended from under this circular, free-standing puddle of liquid light and touched the ground near to where Darmok sat. Ah, she thought, a primitive attempt at a transdimensional conduit into a pocket universe. But hey — it was an open invitation to come aboard; she’d take what she could get.

  She rose from where she sat and stretched her legs; sitting that way for that long had made her ache. She double-checked her personal inventory, to make sure no one had come and robbed her blind while she’d telepathically linked to the ship. A foolish thing to fear on Earth, of all places . . . after all, how many humans knew she was here? The answer had better be “none,” she thought. But, old habits died hard, and she’d seen some pretty rough spaceports in her time. Thus, she’d gotten used to checking. Everything seemed undisturbed . . . no one had come up behind her and stolen part of her suit, such as her helmet, leaving her to suffer the stench of Earth’s atmosphere. So, freshly-stretched and reassured, Darmok marched up the metal walkway and disappeared into the vertical puddle of seawater — though she knew it wasn’t really liquid, but rather the fluctuations of the event horizon of a stabilized, artificial wormhole — and found herself immediately plunged into semi-darkness and standing on a long, corridor-like walkway with a metal grating beneath her feet. Up ahead — about an eighth of a mile in the distance — she could, thanks to her hololenticular implants, see a short staircase leading to a brightly-lit, raised metal dais, on which sat a pedestal filled with crystalline and holographic controls . . . and beyond that, two other large spaces that beyond irised-open chamber doors: An engine room containing a more-or-less standard gravitronic warp engine, and what looked like a surgical operating theatre or laboratory of some kind. Curious, she walked until she reached the stairwell, then ascended it, and stood on the raised dais.

  “Hey . . . hey you! Hey, crazy cat-lady!” cried a barely audible voice from somewhere off to her left. A voice that sounded tiny, almost infinitesimal. Yet, she heard it loud and clear: “Hey Catwoman! Over here! No, look, down here!”

  Startled, Darmok looked around, but found no one there, and no one behind her. She searched all over the raised control dais, and then ran her eyes over the engine room, as well, trying to pinpoint the exact spot she’d heard the voice come from. Her cat-like ears twitched as she tried to use them to triangulate the voice’s point of origin within the structure. At least the universal translator nanobots did their job . . . Another invention of the Space Agency she worked for, the semi-organic nanobots colonized in the brain, and augmented one’s natural linguistic faculties; they enabled a kind of generalized, limited telepathic contact with others — or at least, the universal subconscious — in order to cooperatively translate even completely unknown languages into her own, and to assist her tongue in speaking them in return.

  “No, not over there! Over here! Look, down here!” The voice spoke English. Earth-Native English, at that. So it was a human voice. “No, no, no . . . over here, right here!” It sounded like it came from somewhere closer toward the laboratory, and so she walked in that direction. “Gettin’ warmer, lady. Gettin’ warmer . . . Now look down and over! To your right! No, wait, sorry your left, I mean. My right, your left!” She looked downward and to her left, and scanned the room carefully, fully engaging her hololenticular implants to scan for any and all signs of life. “No, further down, lady! Little further south!” She cast her gaze downward even further, and suddenly, the implants locked onto something and drew her eyes to it: A glass jar sitting on the silver tray next to the operating table, with what looked like a miniaturIzed, part-humanoid, part-caninoid creature stuck inside of it . . . a creature presently waving his blue, furry arms back and forth over his head. She picked up the jar and held it up for further examination. “Finally!” the muffled, exasperated lycanthropic monster said. “Jeeze but you must’ve sucked at hide and seek as a kid, lady. Or a kitten. Or . . . whatever the hell you once were.”

  “What in the name of the Eldar of Nine — ” she began, and shook her head. “What exactly are you? And how is it you speak perfect English, as you’re obviously from someplace other than Earth?”

  “Hey, look lady,” said the Lycan, “I don’t know who or what the fuck you are, or are supposed to be — ‘cause if that’s just cosplay you’re wearing, shit but that’s impressive — so let’s get things straight: I’m not from someplace else. I’m an Earthling, alright, a human. Well, most of the time. I’m a physicist. A Nobel-prize-winning physicist and mathematician, to be exact. I teach string theory cosmology and M-theory at Morchatromik University, and my name is Joseph Michaelson. Dr. Joseph Michaelson, if you please. But most people call me Misto. I got turned into . . . well, this when I got injected with a . . . Gah. Argh. Fuck. Look, it’s complicated, okay? I got injected with a serum that this mad scientist friend of mine invented twenty years ago, so now, from time to time, if I don’t get the antidote in time, I turn into this . . . Fuck, what am I saying? Hell, sometimes, even if I do get the antidote in time, I still change into . . . this. Now, then. Your turn. Who — or what — are you? You look like a David Bowie theme song to a low-budget Stephen King film come to life in living color.”

  Darmok used her neural nanonics to access the matrix data-slice that she’d had embedded in her brain before leaving on the mission. The matrix data-slice functioned as a local copy of The Infinite Repository of Wisdom, Planet Shyphtor’s version of what an older generation of Humans might’ve called an Encyclopedia Galactica. Or, in more modern terms, an “Interstellar Wikipedia.” Or, perhaps, what modern “geeks” and “nerds” of Earth — she hoped she’d phrased that in the right terms, for the sake of her own Earth-edification — would have called a Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. But, despite conducting multiple searches on the idioms he’d just employed, she could not quite grasp the references he’d just made without . . . ah, wait a moment: There they were. David Bowie: Famous alternative rock musician, avant-garde style, individualist, stylized concept albums included “Ziggy Stardust” and the soundtrack to the movie Labyrinth . . . and the song “Cat People,” featured on the “soundtrack” — a selection of appropriate musical accompaniments to the scenes of a — “motion picture” — something like an Entertainment Hologram, only two dimensional instead of three — called Cat People, based on a story of the same name written by horror novelist “Stephen King” and released in 1982. Ah, now she understood, and she smiled. He had made a joke, based on the obvious observation that she was literally a “cat people.” She laughed a little.

  “My name is Darmok, Anjaladatanagra,” she said. “And I’m from a planet called — ”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” said Misto. “Darmok . . . Darmok and-jalad . . . at-tanagra. That’s your name. Really.”

  “Well, yes,” she replied. “Your pronunciation’s a bit off, but, yes. What’s wrong with that? Perfectly good name, if you ask me.”

  “It’s also a famous line of dialogue from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation,” said Misto. “The line goes like this. One person says, ‘Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra’ — ”

  “And the other person answers back, ‘Temba, his arms wide,’” she said, nodding. “And then they add, ‘Shaka, when the walls fell.’ It’s kind of like a handshake. It means you and the other person understand each other in ways that one else can. Am I right?”

  “Er . . . yeah,” he said. “How the hell’d you know that? You’re a . . . well, an . . . uh . . .”

  “An alien,” she said. “Yeah, I know. Just understand — for the moment — that much of Human pop culture, even much of Human geek culture, is well-known, and even enjoyed on my world. It’s a fact.”

  “Huh,” said Misto. “I guess I never realized just how ‘universal’ the universal subconscious is.”

  ”Would you like for me to let you out of that jar? You seem stuck. Or are you actually comfortable in there?”

  “Well, what I’d like is to be is out of this jar and returned to my normal size, which is about a foot and a half taller than you and twice as wide. And I’d like to find some clothes that’d fit me, if that’s even possible.”

  “I have some spare unisex, poly-alloy soft-weave clothing on my ship,” she said, gesturing back the way she ‘d come. “It’s not far from here. Parked it right next door, in fact.”

  “Okay, many thanks . . . but what about returning me to my proper size? The shrinking and re-enlargement ray is on that robotic arm right above me. D’you think you can figure out the controls? They’re on that crystalline pedestal over there . . . there’s a touch panel that — I think — can respond to telepathic influence if you touch your hand to it.”

  Darmok looked over at the control pedestal, and sure enough, she caught sight of the touchpad on the control pedestal. She opened the jar containing Misto, and unceremoniously dumped him out onto the operating table and then tossed the jar aside, where it shattered on the floor.

  “Hey!” he cried. “Lady, you’ve sure got a lousy bedside manner. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  “Shush! Enough from you, little man,” she said, and walked over to the pedestal, and placed her hand upon the touchpad. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the robotic arm. Nothing happened at first. Then, suddenly, the arm jerked into life, and took aim first at Darmok herself, then at the wall, then at the ceiling . . . then finally at Misto. She then concentrated on what she wanted to happen — she guessed that’s how this worked; she really hoped that at the very least, she didn’t accidentally turn him into a melted blob of protein, as he seemed an amiable enough fellow — and the arm positioned itself with its ray-gun like assembly pointed right at Misto from just a few feet away. Darmok held her breath as it fired a purple and green stream of energy at him, and then, with a bright a flash of lightning leaping between it and he, Misto suddenly enlarged . . . back to his full size, seven feet tall, muscled, and at least most of a yard across the chest, and covered in blue fur and hair. At least, she hoped he was the right size, color, and build. Otherwise, she had royally screwed up.

  “Aw Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, thank the gods!” he breathed, and laughed, sitting up on the table, swinging his legs over the side and standing. He stretched his arms over his head. “Thank every god, and even all the saints, and all the Fates and Titans, too. It feels so goddamn good to get outta that friggin’ jar. I’m so . . .” His eyes met Darmok’s, who — for her part — eyed him strangely. She wondered if he realized that he was, in fact, completely naked. Judging by the embarrassed look on his face — and the fact that he looked at her blankly for a second before saying, “Er . . . I’m stark naked, aren’t I,” she guessed him all caught up on that issue. He quickly covered his blue-furred crotch with his two large, clawed hands. “Whoops. Sorry if I’ve, like, flashed you for the last five minutes solid.”

  “Er, um, uh . . . like I said,” offered Darmok, trying to suppress the grin from forming on her feline face, and trying to keep her tail from twitching with amusement. “I have some more of this poly-alloy soft-weave stuff on my ship . . . if you’d like some. And I do mean for you to have it. Free, gratis. No take-backsies.”

  “Er, you really have no idea how much I’d appreciate that,” he said, and she could tell that if he’d still been human, he would’ve blushed like crazy. “But after that, I have to find my friends. Last time I saw them, the hotel . . . had burnt up all around them. They had all passed out from the smoke, from the heat . . . the only one still awake was Jetta . . . my girlfriend . . . but that’s because she’s, like, a Vampire. Yeah, yeah, I know. Vampires really are real, and it’s a really long story. I have to find them. Have to warn them about Ravenkroft. He’s going after them, I know he is. He has the . . . alien inside him, calling the shots. It plans to kill them all, but he plans on killing Dizzy in particular. I have to find out where they are, where she is . . . before he and it do . . . I have to warn them . . .”

  “I see,” said Darmok. “Come with me.” She turned around, and then together, they descended the stairs that led to the long metal walkway, and walked the eighth of a mile toward the transdimensional conduit that led to the outside of the ship. If what he said was true, then everyone in the building below her was in terrible danger, and didn’t even know it. Especially his friends, if they’d angered the Zarcturean Visitor or even gotten on its bad side in some minor way. “C’mon. Let’s get you on my ship and get you dressed . . . and then I’ll help you find your friends. Then, hopefully, I’ll stop this thing before it succeeds in whatever ‘mission’ it’s on down here. Right now, we have to hurry. Time is of the essence.”

  After passing through the conduit and winding up back on the gravel roof of the hotel. Darmok signaled her ship using the matrix data-slice in her brain, and told it to drop the cloak and reveal itself.

  Misto gasped when he saw her ship itself.

  My God . . . it’s beautiful,” was all he said, and Darmok swelled with pride and purred deep in her throat for a brief moment before inwardly slapping herself and telling herself to get over herself and get on with the damned mission. Well, maybe a little indulgence wouldn’t hurt . . .

  “Thank you,” she said, still purring, and couldn’t help but smile and blush a little herself beneath her layer of fur. “I designed her myself. Finest space-time ship in the galaxy, if I do say so myself. She’s The Renegade Angel, and she’s like my daughter . . . only made of metal, oddly shaped, only a little bit alive. And with an eleven-dimensional rift energy engine. Oh well. She’s still family, and gets me where I need to go. Which, apparently, is right here, right now.” She gazed into his eyes for a moment, something she couldn’t quite articulate in words — yet something extremely important, if vague — passing between the two of them. Then she blinked, breaking the spell, and Misto cleared his throat and spoke.

  “Uh, erm uh, hmm. Um, did you know that The Renegade Angel was almost the name of a Meat Loaf album, way back in 1981?” said Misto. “Or at least until songwriter Jim Steinman changed his mind and renamed the album Bad For Good instead, and then did the vocals all himself, because Meat Loaf was too sick and had gotten all freaked out and lost his voice. The title track, ‘Bad For Good,’ is in my humble opinion, fairly friggin’ awesome, despite the fact that Steinman’s voice isn’t nearly as powerful as Meat’s.”

  “You, sir, are a treasure trove of useless — but fascinating — cultural anecdotes,” said Darmok.

  “Thanks. I have to actually work at that, and it seems like nobody ever appreciates it. It’s good to meet a fan now and then.”

  She threw a smile at him from over her shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get aboard and get you some clothes. And then we go to find your friends.”

  Darmok took Misto by the hand and led him to the location of the glass elevator-chamber that rested on the gravel beneath her squid-shaped, crystal-butterfly-winged ship, The Renegade Angel. She reached out and activated the elevator’s controls with a touch of her hand, and the glass doors opened. She led Misto in — he had to duck down so he could fit inside — and the doors closed behind them. The elevator rose, moving up into the ship. Misto gasped as he realized that they passed through whole other levels of the ship — laboratories, cargo bays, a kitchen, a library . . . the existence of all of which the ship’s exterior size had lied about. He comprehended suddenly that Darmok’s ship, just like the Visitor’s, seemed bigger on the inside, by way employing the exact same “transcendimensional mechanics” that he’d helped Dizzy author a paper on the previous year. The elevator slowed to a stop, the glass doors opened, and they stepped out onto what had to be the main bridge, Misto taking it slow, one step at a time and unable to believe his eyes.

  Tears welled-up in his eyes and spilled down his cheeks as he looked around him . . . the place certainly looked alien, and yet it overflowed with a trippy, happy kind of nostalgia for him. Unlike on the Zarcturean Visitor’s ship and its cold and totally alien interior, where he had been a prisoner in a demented funhouse reflection of everything he’d ever dreamed humanity’s First Contact with aliens would be like . . . Here, all of that got turned on its head, and for the better: Here, he stood on the bridge of an actual, honest-to-gods starship . . . a proper starship, with a proper bridge, one that didn’t just smack of Star Trek, but had been practically lifted from it: The bridge was circular, about fifty feet in diameter, with a raised, ten-foot ceiling. The color theme seemed to be pristine, all-white plastic, shiny steel, and polished glass with holograms trapped inside. Various control consoles and panels wrapped themselves around the room’s circular perimeter, each with a ergonomic chair sitting before it, and each jam-packed with touch-screen controls, flashing lights, and holographic displays that showed numerous data-filled, animated images and projections. About eight feet from the rear portion of the bridge, toward the center, stood what looked like a tall glass partition, which displayed even more configurable controls and holographic information. And, right before that, in the exact center of the bridge, there stood — but of course! — the ship’s command chair, reserved for her captain. In front of that sat two more seats in front of two more complex touch-screen control consoles that rose up out of the floor, made from sleek reflective metal and glass components. Unless Misto missed his guess, these would be the ship’s Helm and Navigation consoles. The design was of course unmistakable: Whoever had designed this ship had clearly referenced Gene Roddenberry’s original starship Enterprise as their foundational, architectural touchstone. Misto couldn’t help but smile and laugh a little. Too amazing.

  Best of all, the ship belonged to an alien who had, thus far, proved friendly, kind, and benevolent. Who had helped him. Sure, she was, quite literally a cat-woman, but what of that? He looked like a literal wolf-man at the moment. Appearances meant nothing; intentions and actions meant everything, and he didn’t sense any ill-intentions from the cat-lady . . . except for when it came to the Zarcturean Visitor; she meant that fucker some serious harm. And now, so did he — it and Ravenkroft, too. And if either of them had done anything to hurt Dizzy . . . Oh, they’d pay, the both of them. They’d pay, and then they’d bleed-out and die. But, he would have no more of these thoughts just now . . . No. He decided to let it go, for the moment. Just for now, he would stand here, moved to tears by the fact that in some way — by some strange miracle of fate, accident, and world enough and time — it had all, one way or another, come true: Somewhere in the cosmos, his dreams of a peaceful galactic civilization had actually come to pass. The Federation was really out there, somewhere. The bridge of the Enterprise was real, and it stood here, in all its glory, all around him . . . he could reach out, touch it, and fire the ship’s phasers, if he wanted to! (Though Darmok would probably not appreciate that, and so he refrained from doing so. It took actual work for him to make himself stop, though.) He felt as giddy as a child on Christmas morning, but with a twist: He felt like a child who had come downstairs early and instead of catching his parents putting presents under the tree, had actually caught Santa Claus, in the flesh, eating the cookies he had left for him, right after delivering him the one thing he hadn’t put on his Amazon wish list, but had wanted more than anything.

  Coraline would’ve loved this, he thought to himself. His heart warmed thinking of her. They had stayed up late so many nights watching Trek together. They had burned through every series on Netflix together, from the 1966 original all the way through DS9 and Enterprise. But they had taken it slow. Just one episode every few days, to savor the unfolding of each series, the telling of each Captain’s tale. God how he had loved her. He would never love like that again. Not ever. He supposed he could love again someday, but no, never would he love like that ever again, not ever in a million years. She had been so wonderful to him, given him so many dreams, and had believed in his.

  Star Trek — and the future that it promised mankind — had been, however silly, a dream they had believed in together. That a brighter future for humanity was possible, that it was in the cards, somehow, despite all the doom and gloom that humanity constantly manufactured for itself. And this ship . . . the things all around him now . . . this proved it was possible. This proved, once and for all, that it was possible for a species — a peaceful species — to lift itself up by the bootstraps and say yes to cooperation, to fueling their dreams with stardust and optimism, to reaching for the stars instead of keeping their noses down in the dirt. This ship, its very existence, vindicated all the dreaming that they had ever done together. It made those dreams worth something. Darmok didn’t know it, but she had just given Misto the greatest gift that anyone ever could have. She had validated his and Coraline’s shared dream of the future, and for that, he owed her. Big time.

  I miss you babe, he thought, as he ran his hand along one of the consoles. God do I ever miss you.

  “Misto?” said Darmok. She had crossed to the other side of the bridge and now stood near a sliding door that stood next to the second of the elevators. “Misto, is there something wrong? We need to hurry.”

  He broke out of his reverie and blinked a few times, then wiped his tears away with the fur on his arm. “Oh, no, no. Nothing’s wrong. Far from it. I was just thinking of something . . . really cool, is all. This place just reminds me of it, is all. Sorry. Where are we headed, here?”

  “Right here,” she said, indicating the room with the sliding door and giving him an odd look. “My Ready Room. There’s seven extra sets of clothes in here. C’mon, slowpoke.”

  “Hey,” he said as he crossed the bridge to where she stood. “Got a question for you.”

  “Got an answer for ya.”

  “How did you learn to speak English so well? The Visitor can’t speak it at all, but it sounds perfectly natural coming out of you. Just listening to you, I’d peg you as being from somewhere in the northern American mideast, maybe New York or Pennsylvania. Maybe Connecticut. My question is . . . how?”

  Darmok sighed as the door to the Ready Room opened and they entered. “Just one second,” she said. The door slid closed behind them. She touched the panel on the wall, and the clothing cabinet opened once again, to reveal another outfit just like hers, sans the gun-belt, and the pulse-thruster pack. “Okay. Get dressed, and I’ll tell you how it is that I speak English this well. And yes, I promise not to look at you.”

  She turned her back to him, and Misto began getting dressed. The poly-alloy soft-weave stuff wound up feeling incredibly good on his skin, and it seemed to stretch — and to conform, also — in all the right places, somehow; as if it “knew” where it had to fit, and where it needed to expand. As he got dressed, Darmok spoke to him:

  “While there’s only one actual Human species in the galaxy, there are lots of human-like species, because there a lot of Earth-like planets. Our species evolved from cats, as you can probably guess. We began walking upright, on two legs instead of four, because we developed opposable thumbs, and we needed our hands free to do other things. So eventually, our inner ears developed a better sense of balance, our centers of gravity changed, our tails became useful for helping us balance our weight, and before y’knew it, a million years later — bam — we became a two-legged species. We first visited your planet about 3,200 years ago, in the place you call Egypt. We crowned the first pharaoh, King Menes, in 3150 B.C. Ever wondered why the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats the way they did? Yeah. That whole ‘civilization’ thing? You’re welcome. Anyway, we built the pyramids, and we were there when Egypt fell to Persia for the second time. We stood beside Alexander the Great when he ushered in the Ptolemaic pharaohs, and were there when Cleopatra offed herself after Mark Anthony kicked it. We’ve studied humans for a very long time.

  “Why? Well, it’s because you’re . . . unique. In all the cosmos, there’s only one human race, and some of my people — especially the elders of my race — believe that there’s only one human race for the same reason there’s only one Shyphtorilaen race . . . Because a third race, a benevolent, god-like people that my people refer to as ‘the Aletheiaeon’ created both races — intelligently designed them, if you will. According to legend, the Aletheiaeon were once corporeal and human-like . . . until they discovered a technology that they called ‘Transcendence,’ which allowed them to ascend to a higher state of being . . . a dimension of pure consciousness, wherein their individual minds all became independent nodes of one enormous ‘overmind,’ a single living thought-stream that exists within the quantum structure of spacetime itself, and that now ‘watches over’ — hence the name — the entire multiverse, pulling strings behind the scenes, as it were, subtly guiding and manipulating the currents of fate and destiny so as to affect outcomes that it judges to be for the greater good.

  “The Aletheiaeon’ opposite number, their dark reflection — a race called the Eidolon — never managed to fully Transcend the physical, as their version of the technology was inferior to that which the Aletheiaeon perfected. They exist now as . . . well, as ghosts, of a sort, wraiths who haunt the doors that allow travel between parallel universes, any portals or gateways that open into hyperspace and the higher-dimensional bulk that stands between membranes in M-space. They are enemies of the Aletheiaeon, and they believe that they can still finish Transcending . . . if they can get some still-physical race to perfect the tech for them, provided that that race is advanced enough. And so, they try to bring about this ‘Master Race’ in the cosmos, by pitting species against species, civilization against civilization . . . sponsors of a never-ending War of All Against All, and the only ones who can stand against them are those planets and species who ally themselves with the Aletheiaeon. Planets and species such as mine, Misto. And, planets such as Earth, and species such as yours. Humans.

  “And we — well, at least I — could sure use your help. And your friends’ help, as well, if they can give it. I’ve got an alien to out-fox, track down, and kill, and an invasion force to thwart . . . and not much time in which to do it.”

  “Whoa, whoa . . . wait just a second,” said Misto, stepping out from behind her, now fully dressed. He had to admit: He liked the way the crimson duster looked on him; plus, the way it had flexed and expanded to cover his proportions felt awesome. He wished Earth-clothing did that; it’d save him replacing it after transformations. He also loved the way the black, poly-alloy soft-weave clothing looked, fit, and felt. Again — why couldn’t Earth perfect clothing like this? The red poly-alloy gloves, both properly connected to the tubes and wires in the duster, looked smashing on him as well. The helmet did not fit him, of course; its makers had intended it for more “humanesque” heads than his was at the moment. Still, he looked like a space-faring badass, if he did say so himself. Last but not least, he clipped Dizzy's communicator pin to his duster's left breast. But now wasn’t the time to go fishing for compliments — not after what he’d just heard. “Hold on just a minute,” he continued. “Did you just say the words invasion force?”

  “Well, duh,” she said. “Of course I did. Why else would the Zarcturean Visitor sneak around inside people, conducting experiments on them, if it weren’t gathering intelligence on human physiology, medicine, illness, metabolism, and other biological functions, en masse, from lots of humans at once? Why else would you think it wants that information?”

  “Uh . . . I dunno. I thought, maybe, scientific curiosity, perhaps . . . ?”

  “I swear. By the Aletheiaeon, you humans can be so na?ve. I think that’s what makes you so charming. But, no, silly: the Zarcturean plan to attack your planet. That Visitor isn’t the only one of his kind here on Earth. There are others. A lot of others, in fact. And all of them — every last one — are either inside human bodies, or controlling them using Globulons. Why else do you think they’ve practically mothballed your manned space program, put away your brilliant ‘Space Shuttle,’ and defunded your exploration of other planets? Why else is there no more interest in returning to the moon? Or in going to Mars? Or Europa? Spoiler alert — yes; there’s something there. And no, I’m not gonna tell you what it is. Get off your asses and go there, if you wanna know more. But, anyway. C’mon. We’ve got a lot of work to do. First we have to find your friends . . . and then we have to find the Visitor, and dispose of it.”

  She moved toward the Ready Room door and it opened. They exited onto the bridge — another small thrill ran through Misto as he set eyes on all the cool glass, chrome, and white plastic work of it once again — and the Ready Room door closed behind them. They crossed to the elevator in which they’d arrived. The door opened long enough for them to enter, and then closed.

  “Well right now,” said Misto, as they began to descend, “it’s in the body of a guy I used to be friends with once. The Visitor, I mean. A dangerous guy, too. His name is Viktor. Well, no that’s not right. The guy I used to be friends with was Viktor Arkenvalen. Viktor’s okay. He’s a bit of an asshole, and suffers from all sorts of anxieties and neuroses, but for the most part, he’s harmless. But. Something we went through together a long time ago sort of gave birth to this other person inside of him, this Ravenkroft personality, and he’s . . . well, Ravenkroft’s nucking futz. A true mad scientist, for real. He hurts people. On purpose. Says he believes in furthering the cause of evolution, of natural selection . . . of augmenting humanity and pushing it forward, toward its ‘ultimate destiny, the apotheosis of its evolution.’ And now this ‘Visitor’ of yours is inside him, and it’s . . . it’s weird. It’s not like it’s controlling him, or anything like that . . . not the way it controlled my girlfriend earlier, when it got inside of her. No, it’s more like they’re working together. It’s like they’re partners, almost.”

  “Oh, that is so not good,” said Darmok, shaking her head. “That’s really, really not good. Because if he’s developed a symbiotic relationship with the Visitor, that means the Visitor has learned that humans in general can do that with its kind. And if it’s learned that, then it’s discovered that it can use human brains and bodies not just as slave labor or puppets . . . but as augmentations to Zarcturean minds and bodies . . . mental and physical upgrades, if you will, with the human brain itself subjugated, the human identity all washed away until only Zarcturean-thought and Zarcturean-identity remain, the functional power of the brain dedicated to processing Zarcturean mental constructs. Your one-time ‘friend’s’ alternate personality might think he has discovered a ‘new direction’ in which human evolution should travel . . . but if that’s the case, he’s sadly mistaken. I have to stop him and the Visitor before it’s too late . . . for the Visitor will, in the end, consume this ‘Ravenkroft’s’ mind piece by piece, driving him even madder in the process.”

  “Yikes,” said Misto, raising a furry eyebrow. “Damn. Ravenkroft, even crazier. Y’know, that’s actually kind of hard to imagine . . . but, I suppose I’ll take your word for it. Eesh, though. Not a pleasant thought.” The elevator touched down on the gravel of the rooftop and the glass doors opened. “Okay,” he said, as they exited. “Where to next?”

  “Next, we go find your friends and then we bust some alien ass!” She jerked her head toward the busted-up door to the stairwell there on the rooftop, and pulling out one of the Decimator guns from her gun-belt. She turned the “safety” switch off, and then handed it to Misto. “Here. Mode switch. Shoots plasma bolts in Mode One, shoots lightning in Mode Two. Shoots antimatter blasts in Mode Three . . . just don’t point it anything you’re attached to if it’s ever in Mode Three. Try not to need the damned thing in any mode, is my motto.” He took it from her and put in the duster’s pocket. Darmok drew her own crimson coat across her waist and fastened it closed, to hide the remaining gun from view. And together, they descended the stairwell on the roof of the hotel, heading into the maelstrom of the convention.