"Mom," Julie hissed. She swung her M14 around in an arc, searching for a target. Milo, Sam and Holly did likewise. Five sets of lights crisscrossed the cave. I could not hear anything over our nervous breathing. "Come out and fight!" she shouted into the dark, her voice echoing over and over.

"No. I don't want to fight you." The voice came from one side. I thought that perhaps I had caught a tiny bit of movement as the light flickered past. "You're my daughter. We don't need to be enemies." Now from the other side. I swung back around. Damn Masters are fast.

"What do you want, then?" Julie demanded. Milo cracked more glow sticks and tossed them into the dark, giving us a little bit larger circle of illumination.

"I want us to be a family again, me and you and little Nate. I know he's up there, too." Her voice came from the ceiling above our heads. Holly cranked off a shot into the rocks, it ricocheted across the cavern, and Susan's laughter rose behind us.

"Wait until you've got a target," Sam ordered.

"All of us, even your daddy. One big happy family," Susan said pleasantly. I began to shiver as I felt her probing our minds.

"Too late for that. You killed him. The Feds have probably already burned the body." Julie's eyes narrowed as she searched the shadows, cheek resting on the stock of her rifle.

"Oh, honey. Once again, you think you know what's going on. You always thought you had everything figured out. Do you really think somebody like good old Myers would cut your daddy's head off if he thought that there might be some information in there of use? I've known Myers since he was a Newbie. He was always a cold-hearted son of a gun. Always practical. You know your daddy trained him, right? You would think he would be sentimental just once and would have done his old mentor a favor and finished him off."

"What are you saying?"

"Your daddy's alive." She put the accent on alive, almost as if she was singing it. "Well, not really alive, as you know, but something so much better."

"Lying bitch!" Julie shouted.

"Wait, there's more," Susan laughed. "The Feds were expecting some easy-to-handle, wimpy, new creation…

A weak new vampire. You had your daddy for two nights. I visited him the first night and you never even knew. He was so happy to see me. He would have done anything I asked of him. He even partook of my blood. You know what that means, don't you?"

"I'm going to stake you if it's the last thing I do," Julie vowed.