About eighteen months ago, a gang of vamp punks had kidnapped the daughter of Joe Guaneri, a mob boss in nearby Pittston. He'd paid the ransom, but the vamps killed the girl, anyway. Her body was found drained dry.

  Even though the vamps didn't turn her, the family had buried the girl with a wooden stake through her chest, and stuffed the mouth of her decapitated head with garlic. I figured the funeral was one of those closed casket ceremonies.

  Guaneri had plenty of his own soldiers to call on for payback, but none of them had any experience against vamps. So he'd hired Sharkey, instead. Guess he wanted to get more than even.

  The vamp gang had taken over an abandoned public school building in Carbondale and made it their HQ. Even had a squad of armed humans to guard the place during the day. Being a dhampir, Sharkey could have gone in there at any time, day or night, but he'd waited until after sundown to make his move. Maybe he'd been told to be sure the vamps could see what was coming.

  Nobody knows if that bomb belonged to the vamps, or if Sharkey brought it in himself. I wouldn't have bet either way. On the one hand, a bomb wasn't really Sharkey's style – too impersonal, not enough time for the victims to scream. On the other hand, the explosion had not only leveled the building – it had taken out two civilians walking by outside. That sounded like the Shark – he was never real careful about collateral damage.

  Karl was right. Nobody had ever made a positive ID on Sharkey's body, or on any of the others. The forensics people estimated that twenty to twenty-five pounds of C-4 explosive had gone off inside that building. From what I hear, the biggest body part they found would still have fit easily inside a shoebox.

  That would've killed Sharkey, all right. Dhampirs have the strengths of a vampire, like speed, strength, and the power of Influence. But they have the weaknesses of a human. A bullet in the chest will kill a dhampir just like it would you or me. So will an explosion, like the one that leveled the old Roosevelt school. It had sure taken care of the vampires.

  When Sharkey wasn't seen or heard from after the blast, everybody figured he'd died inside the demolished school. Maybe we liked the idea because it was comforting. The peasants in Transylvania must've felt the same way when they heard Dracula was dead.

  But Dracula keeps rising from the grave – in the movie versions, anyway.

  "Have you given any thought to the possibility that your CI might be full of shit?" I asked Karl.

  "Sure," he said. "But he's been pretty reliable in the past."

  "He didn't say he'd seen Sharkey himself, though, did he?"

  "No, he was just telling me what was in the rumor mill."

  "Well, we've both been in this business long enough to know what rumors are worth. Remember the one that said a bunch of cannibals were eating people up around Lake Wallenpaupack?"

  The "cannibals" had turned out to be a homeless family, living in a tent and getting by on whatever they could catch. They had eaten squirrels, fish, rabbits, and a couple of feral cats, but no people, as far as we could tell.

  "Yeah, I know," Karl said, and shrugged. "You're right – the guy was probably full of shit."

  "Exactly," I said. We were like two kids whistling as we walked past the old haunted house. As long as you sounded happy, nothing bad could get you.

  It works pretty well, since there's usually nothing inside the "haunted house" to hurt you, anyway.

  But sometimes the ghosts are real, and whistling does no damn good at all.

• • • •

Pretend that there's a file folder somewhere, a big, thick one, labeled Real Bad Ideas. There's at least three things I can think of that belong in there – inviting a werewolf for a moonlight stroll, telling a witch she's got a fat ass, and pissing off an ogre.

  Especially that last one.

  Despite what you read in the fairy tales, most ogres are fairly mellow creatures. They're not green and cute, like that guy in the movies – Dreck, or whatever his name is, but they're not usually criminal types, either. Mostly they're just big, strong, and dumb, like the one Steinbeck wrote about in Of Elves and Men. But all the same, it doesn't pay to get one mad.

  I figured somebody had done just that, since the inside of Leary's Bar looked like something you'd find in Berlin at the end of World War II – just after the Russians had passed through. Six tables were smashed, along with ten or twelve chairs. The big mirror was just a memory. One of the ceiling lights had been hit so hard by something – or someone – that the big fluorescent bulb hung down at the end of some thick black wire, blinking and sputtering. I had no idea how many liquor bottles had been smashed, but the odor of alcohol was so strong in there that a couple of deep breaths would probably cause you to flunk a Breathalyzer test.

  If you needed additional proof of ogre outrage, there were always the three guys strewn across on the floor, who looked like they'd tried to wrestle a locomotive and come off second best. They were either unconscious, comatose, or dead.

  Then there was the girl – a barmaid, judging by her outfit. She looked to be scared about half out of her mind, and I didn't blame her, since the pissed-off ogre, back against the wall, was holding her with one massive paw wrapped around her waist, like a kid playing with a Barbie doll – and not playing real gently, either.

  A couple of uniforms were standing just inside the door, what they thought was a safe distance away. I looked over my shoulder and called to them, "Get Leary in here, will you? And find out what's keeping those damn ambulances."

  It was quiet inside what was left of the barroom. The only sounds came from the ogre, whose breathing sounded like midnight in a TB ward, and the waitress, who was crying softly.

  Keeping my voice low, I asked my partner, "Can you use Influence on him, get him calmed down?"

  "I doubt it," Karl said. "I'm not real good at that stuff yet. Anyway, there's not much of a mind there to work with, haina?"

  Karl's been my partner for just over a year and a half now, and a vampire for about three months. He's a good kid, even with the fangs.

  I nodded. My luck never runs that good, but it'd been worth a try. "You're a lot stronger than you used to be," I said. "If it comes to a rumble, can you take him?"

  Karl looked the ogre up and down. It took a while, since the guy was over seven foot from head to toe. You can find some NBA players that tall, but the ogre wasn't lean and quick, the way those guys are. He was built more along the lines of the Great Wall of China.