A bolt of lightning struck so near that the entire castle rattled, and Bistritz let out a piercing shriek. Had Dracula been able to see his fur, he would have seen it standing on end, the bat pricked all over by fright.

“Soon, my friend,” he called out, but the call was but a whimper, and he himself was not certain whom he was addressing: this brave bat, or the man of Cape Agulhas who yet ignored him.

This snow, even through the night, glistened gently under vampire eyes and the mild light of the moon. Now Dracula turned his back to it. Reclining and resting his elbows on the wheel, he surveyed the captain’s deck. He had taken a few things from his study and plopped them hastily in this room, so that they lay scattered and shifting…like the sands of Giza, if sands were huge and mostly book-shaped. Here was a short shelf crammed with cookbooks, spilling at least one every hour; there an antique globe, hilariously outdated, whirling; and here, close to his foot, was a holophone, whose twisting shape was so gnarled and futuresque that I will not hazard to describe it to you.

And there in the stairwell an Adam, his eyes oddly bright in the dimnitude.

“Are you well, Sir Count?”

“Out with it.”

Adam flinched. He blinked, and now Dracula knew it was not his imagination; those were lights in his eyes, two honey-colored beams, faint. Adam drew a tad closer, mounting the last stair.

“What do you mean? I merely offer my comfort, such as it is. I doubt you have slept even a piddle since Giza.”

“I mean,” said Dracula, “that something weighs on your mind, and it has greater gravity than all my troubles.” Adam flinched again, his sun-eyes widening. “I can sense it…and see it. I would tell you to look in a mirror, but—ha! …you will just have to trust me. Or, perhaps, you might feel the spaces under your eyes. Those bags. Are they not heavier?”

He lifted cautious hands to his face, conceding, “I have not slept either, for I have spent my nights…deliberating.”

Dracula felt certain he was hiding something, would have slept if his body would allow it. Sad, he thought, that Adam wished so dearly not to trouble him! He remembered sleepless nights, however, as part of his own Baptism of Blood; they would not assail the new vampire for long.

“I have been pondering werewolfism,” said Adam, and as he revealed a full truth, his speech grew more comfortable; he entered the mode of an inquirer, a scholar. “You are both werewolf and vampire, correct? Do the two states…confound each other?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it seems it is not that you avoid Earth, but that you have no choice, for most werewolves do not sip blood, and can survive with ease in the day.”

Dracula smiled. “Very observant. A true vampire, one who knows his stuff, has ways around this. He becomes the night, remember; he uses stealth to plunder. He cloaks his inability to walk in daylight behind excuses—a fancy castle packed with servants, for example.”

With a hushed gasp, Adam said, “Or a houselike dome covered in furs.”

“You’ve got it!” Dracula snapped his fingers. “Igor has mastered the masquerade. Very few know of his vampirism, very few now living. I do not know how many servants provide for his vampiric needs in that house of his. (I do theorize—as I am a man of science—that the First Lady may be offering her help…or her neck.) Through televised inter-webs, I have seen him navigate the public space. When attending conferences, for instance, he strides straight from vehicle to building, making sure to walk under trees and awnings.”

“Then there are ways?”

Dracula did not plumb the full depths of this final line. He did not realize how cryptic it was, for he had no time to—for Bistritz let out a remarkable cry, a different cry, louder than any he had heard all night. A happy cry! A nostalgic cry, for even to Bistritz this home and its man were familiar.