Kristi didn’t have much time, but on the bike she zipped across campus, cutting between pedestrians, joggers, and skateboarders to Wagner House. Today in the gloomy daylight the house appeared less sinister, the sharp peaked roof, beveled glass windows, gargoyle downspouts all just part of the architectural style of a bygone era.

Before leaving her apartment, Kristi had taken the time to pull up a list of students in the school, locating Marnie Gage on the roster. Marnie’s picture had flashed onto the screen along with her short bio indicating that she had graduated from Grant High School in Portland, Oregon, and was an English major working on a minor in theater.

Again, the English Department, Kristi had thought. It didn’t take a PhD to figure out that the girl probably was or had been in the same block of classes as Kristi and the missing coeds were. Kristi was starting to believe the entire department was somehow involved in this underground vampire cult or whatever it was.

“That’s ridiculous,” she told herself.

But was it?

Her skin crawled, and she sensed again that someone was watching her. Someone hidden. Someone evil.

She felt a chill, a cold gust of wind brush against the back of her neck. As the clouds overhead threatened rain, she propped her bike against the wrought-iron fence and tried the gate. It was locked. Of course. No matter how hard she pushed on it, or fiddled with the clasp, it didn’t budge, and the hours of operation posted on the gate indicated the museum wouldn’t be open until two this afternoon. Supposedly the museum closed at five-thirty PM.

But it had opened last night.

Kristi had damned well been inside. Along with Marnie Gage and at least one other person, maybe more. Had they been in the basement, down the locked staircase? Was it the meeting of the cult Lucretia had mentioned, then denied?

“Weird, weird, weird,” she told herself. Staring through the wrought iron bars of the fence, she studied the old foundation but could only see the tops of basement windows, dark and opaque. Probably used for storage. Not secret meetings where blood was let and vampires revered.

But the blond girl, Marnie Gage, had gone inside, and someone had been following her throughout the upstairs rooms. Could Marnie have doubled back and gotten behind her? But why? Was this place somehow connected to the missing girls, the damned cult that Lucretia now disavowed?

In that second she felt cold as death. Hadn’t she seen Ariel hanging around here? Then Marnie? Both whose faces had turned the color of death. That left Lucretia. Kristi didn’t know of any connection she had with the old house, but she was willing to bet her life that her ex-roommate was somehow involved with this old, dark edifice.

So how does Dad fit in?