Warren, who was sitting on the floor in his favorite position—leaning back against Kyle’s legs—hit the pause button, sat forward, and twisted around so he could see Stefan, sitting on the other side of the couch. I, as the lone girl, got the big new recliner.

“The movie has it right? Max Schreck really was a vampire?” Warren asked. Max Schreck was the name of the man who played the vampire in Nosferatu.

Stefan nodded. “Schreck wasn’t his real name, but he used it for a century or two, so it will do.

Scary old monster. Really scary, really old. He decided he wanted to be on film, and none of the other vampires felt like challenging him over it.”

“Wait a minute,” said Kyle. “I thought that one of the complaints about Nosferatu was that all the scenes with Schreck were obviously filmed in daylight. Don’t you vampires all go to sleep in the daytime?”

Kyle, as Warren’s lover, knew a lot more about the things that go bump in the night than most humans, to whom vampires were movie

monsters, not men who wore Scooby-Doo shirts and lived in upscale houses in real towns. It wouldn’t be long, though, I thought, before vampires were outed. Werewolves had outed themselves a year and a half ago—though they were careful what they told the public. The fae had been out since the 1980s. People were gradually learning that the world is a scarier place than the scientific reasoning of the last few centuries had led them to believe.

“We die during the day,” said Stefan. “But Max was very old. He was capable of all sorts of things, and it would not surprise me to know that he could walk in the day. I only met him once—a long time before Nosferatu. He attended one of the festas of the Master of Milan, the Lord of Night, without invitation. It was odd to see so many powerful people cower before one unwashed, poorly dressed, amazingly ugly man. I saw him kill a two-hundred-year-old vampire with a look—just disintegrated her to dust with one glance because she laughed at him. The Lord of the Night, who was her master, was very old and powerful, even then—and he did not voice an objection though she was the youngest of his get and dear to him.”

“Is Schreck still alive?” Warren asked.

“I don’t know,” said Stefan, and added, half under his breath, “I don’t want to know.”

“Was he always that ugly, or did he get worse with age?” asked Kyle. Kyle was beautiful, and he knew it. I was never certain if he was really vain, or if it was one of a dozen things that he used to camouflage the sharp mind behind the pretty face.

I suspected it was both.

Stefan smiled. “That’s the question that haunts the older vampires. One doesn’t ask questions about age, but we can tell, more or less. Wulfe is probably the oldest vampire—other than Max—