"What do you make of this, Pitt?" He shined a flashlight into the interior. There were seven wooden crates inside. Each was long enough and deep enough to easily hold a person. I ducked my head as I entered, pulling out my own flashlight to get a closer look. The air tasted stale. The lids for the crates had been set aside, and the interiors seemed to be filled with nothing but dirt. I ran my hands through one; it was a thick black loam. Another was white particulate sand, and yet another looked almost like Alabama red clay.

"Coffins," I said. "For the seven Masters in my dream."

"Yep," Harbinger said. "And I'm willing to bet that the dirt is soil from their native lands."

"What does that mean?" Julie asked. "I know I've heard about that in the folk tales, but we've never seen evidence of vampires actually needing to sleep in soil from their homeland."

"Beats me. But this is really a weird bunch. I've never seen anything like this before, and I've never even heard or read about anything like this either."

"We don't know for sure that they are really Masters, Earl," Sam said. "We haven't actually seen any of them yet."

"The stronger the creator, the greater the creation. Some of those sailors we killed were way too powerful to be that young, but they were. Plus creating wights as daylight guardians? Darné was as powerful as a hundred-year-old bloodsucker, and he has to have been turned in the last week. Whoever turned him was one bad dude. So there is at least one Master in this gang. I would bet on it," Harbinger replied.

"So how did you beat Darné anyway?" I asked. The other Hunters glanced at their team leader, curious to hear his response.

"Later. It isn't important right now."

"He was a good guy when he was human," Sam said. "Losing him is a damn shame."

"People change when they are turned. It doesn't matter what they were like before. No matter how good they were, when they turn, they come back as pure evil…" Julie trailed off, and then changed the subject. "We probably need to alert the Feds. Seven high-level vamps on U.S. soil? They would shut us down in a second if they found out that we knew and didn't tell them."

"I hate Feds." Milo spoke for the first time. Sam spit on the floor.

"Me too. But they need to mobilize. They're somewhere in Georgia, and heading who knows where. I'll call Myers," Harbinger told them with a look like he had just bit into something sour. "They probably won't believe us though. Hell, I don't believe what I'm saying."

I looked in the other coffins. Thicker sand, rich topsoil, alkali dirt, and finally broken shale and gravel. I noticed something as I shined my light in the back corner.

"You guys seen this?"