Crap! So I huddled by his corpse and listened. Had I left the front door unlocked? Of course I had. And the second I realized that, I heard a floorboard creak overhead. They were in the house.

“. . . no drips,” said a voice, probably from the foyer. I started to crawl to the hatch door so I could hear . . . but I paused. There was at least a chance that if they found the hatch and flipped it open, they still wouldn’t see Bill and me. We were way back in a corner, and this was a very big space. Maybe it had been sort of a cellar, as close to a cellar as you could get in a place that had such a high water table.

“Yeah, but the door was open. She must have come in here.” It was a nasal voice, and it was a little closer than it had been.

“And she flew across the floor, leaving no footprints? Raining as hard as it is out there?” The sarcastic voice was a bit deeper.

“We don’t know what she is.” Nasal guy.

“Not a vampire, Kelvin. We know that.”

Kelvin said, “Maybe she’s a werebird or something, Hod.”

“Werebird?” The snort of incredulity echoed in the dark house. Hod could really do sarcastic.

“Did you see the ears on that guy? That was pretty incredible. You can’t rule out nothing, these days,” Kelvin advised his buddy.

Ears? They were talking about Dermot. What had they done to him? I was ashamed. This was the first time I’d thought about what might have befallen my great-uncle.

“Yeah, and? He must be one of those science fiction geeks.” Hod didn’t sound like he was paying much attention to what he was saying. I heard cabinets open and close. No way I could have been in any of those places.

“Nah, man, I’m sure they were real. No scars or anything. Maybe I shoulda taken one.”

Taken one? I shivered.

Kelvin, who was closer to the pantry than Hod, added, “I’m gonna go upstairs, check out the rooms up there.” I heard the sound of his boots diminish, heard the distant creak of the stairs, his muffled footfalls up the carpeted treads. Very faintly, I followed some of his movements on the second floor. I knew when he was directly above me, in the room I figured was the master bedroom, where I’d slept when I was dating Bill.

While Kelvin was gone, Hod wandered to and fro, though he didn’t seem very purposeful to me.

“Right . . . there’s nobody here,” Kelvin announced when he returned to the former kitchen. “Wonder why there’s a hot tub in the house?”