Callahan’s smile faded. He was rubbing his scarred right hand the way the gunslinger had rubbed his hip, without seeming to realize it. “The vampire made a proposal. He would let the boy go if I’d put down the crucifix I held. We’d face each other unarmed. His faith against mine. I agreed. God help me, I agreed. The boy”

Three

The boy is gone, like an eddy of dark water.

Barlow seems to grow taller. His hair, swept back from his brow in the European manner, seems to float around his skull. He’s wearing a dark suit and a bright red tie, impeccably knotted, and to Callahan he seems part of the darkness that surrounds him. Mark Petrie’s parents lie dead at his feet, their skulls crushed.

“Fulfill your part of the bargain, shaman.”

But why should he? Why not drive him off, settle for a draw this night? Or kill him outright? Something is wrong with the idea, terribly wrong, but he cannot pick out just what it is. Nor will any of the buzzwords that have helped him in previous moments of crisis be of any help to him here. This isn’t anomie, lack of empathy, or the existential grief of the twentieth century; this is avampire. And —

And his cross, which had been glowing fiercely, is growing dark.

Fear leaps into his belly like a confusion of hot wires. Barlow is walking toward him across the Petrie kitchen, and Callahan can see the thing’s fangs very clearly because Barlow is smiling. It is a winner’s smile.

Callahan takes a step backward. Then two. Then his buttocks strike the edge of the table, and the table pushes back against the wall, and then there is nowhere left to go.

“Sad to see a man’s faith fail,” says Barlow, and reaches out.

Why should he not reach out? The cross Callahan is holding up is now dark. Now it’s nothing but a piece of plaster, a cheap piece of rick-rack his mother bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper’s price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough spiritual voltage to smash down walls and shatter stone, is gone.