Fet loosened the drawstring on his sack and overturned the contents onto the floor. Four furry rodents landed in a heap, all dead.

Eph jumped back and Nora gasped.

“I always say, you want to get people’s attention, bring ’em a bag of rats.” Fet picked one up by its long tail, its body twirling slowly back and forth under his hand. “They’re coming up out of their burrows all across the city. Even in daytime. Something’s driving them out. Meaning, something’s not right. I know that during the black death, rats came out and dropped dead in the streets. These rats here aren’t coming up to die. They’re coming up plenty alive and plenty desperate and hungry. Take my word for it, when you see a big change in rat ecology, it means bad news is on the way. When the rats start to panic, it’s time to sell GE. Time to get out. Know what I mean?”

Setrakian said, “I do indeed.”

Eph said, “I’m missing something here. What do rats have to do with…?”

“They are a sign,” said Setrakian, “as Mr. Fet rightly states. An ecological symptom. Stoker popularized the myth that a vampire can change its form, transforming into a nocturnal creature such as a bat or a wolf. This false notion arises out of a truth. Before dwellings had basements or cellars, vampires nested in caves and dens on the edges of villages. Their corruptive presence displaced the other creatures, bats and wolves, driving them out so that they overran the villages—their appearance always coinciding with the spreading sickness and the corruption of souls.”

Fet was paying close attention to the old man. “You know what?” he said. “Twice when you were just talking, I heard you say the word ‘vampire.’”

Setrakian looked at him evenly. “That you did.”

After a contemplative pause, and a long look at the others, Fet said, “Okay.” As though he was starting to get it. “Now let me show you the other thing.”

He led them down into the basement. The smell was one of foul incense, of something diseased that had been burned. He showed them the atomized flesh and bone, now cold cinder lying on the floor of the basement. The rectangle of window sunlight had elongated and moved, shining against the wall now. “But it was beaming down here, and they went into it, and it cooked them in an instant. But, before that, they came at me with this…thing shooting out from underneath their tongues.”

Setrakian told him the short version. The rogue Master stowing away on Flight 753. The disappearing coffin. The morgue dead rising and returning to their Dear Ones. The household nests. The Stoneheart Group. Silver and sunlight. The stinger.

Fet said, “Their heads tipped back and their mouths opened up…and it was like that candy, that kids’ candy—the one that used to come with Star Wars character heads.”