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Mike straightened, turned, picked up the dustpan, and walked out of the bathrooone from his conscious mind Secretly and quietly shoved down by some unknown hand into a darker and less accessible place inside He did not even remeht-thirty, picked a azine off the rack, and sat down on the stool behind the counter to wait for the day to start

At nine o’clock precisely, the bell above the door tinkled and Mike looked up from the latest copy of Cemetery Dance to see a police officer enter the shop He was a big, brawny, blond-haired cop with a very neatly pressed unifor chro on his shoes looked like polished coal, but despite his fastidious clothing he walked with a noticeable lied

Mike’s heart froze in his chest

It was Tow-Truck Eddie

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Newton sat at his desk with his main computer on in front of hile search pages open on each and a half dozen Word docue as his fingers blurred over the keys, typing in search argu and pasting information and URLs He’d been at this for hours now, ever since driving back froe of clothes, no food except for the cups of coffee that had long since turned his stomach to acid

Willard Fowler Neas furious He was hurt and scared, too, but o he was just another third-string reporter in a fifth-rate town like Black Marsh A day ago he was, he knew, a geek Nerdy and kind of annoying--insights often provided for hieek He could do geek without effort

Noas caught up in so that involved vampires Actual vampires

That’s what made Fowler so furious Vampires should not be any part of the world in which he lived Vampires were TV and -Collins Vampires were Halloween costumes and Count Chocula Vampires were fiction At worst they were supposed to be eeks do not belong in the same reality, of that he was quite certain

In vampire stories there were only two kinds of characters--victi remotely heroic in his nature, but he sure as hell did not want to be a victi that the world now included vaet olves--was tootwo The classics Right here in River City Shit

Croas the hero, Newton knew He’d already shown that by facing Ruger twice Val was a hero, too She’d fought Ruger herself, and she’d killed Boyd At best, Newton knew, he was the squatty sidekick ould probably not e froood odds on that gaave that a lot of thought No one would bla a coward After all…ere talking supernatural monsters here He didn’t have a black belt like Crow or a will of iron and a big-ass pistol like Val All he had hat?

That was the thought process that took hi like a baby and praying to a God he hadn’t said "boo!" to since his bar ht now Parked at his co stuff out It’s what a geek would do

He kept at it for hours, researching everything he could find, punishing the keys with stabbing finger hits He searched on vampires and olves, and at first the enormity of the available information nearly stopped hile the search told him there were 54,200,000 hits

"Holy shit!" he breathed, then tried adding an "s" to make it "Vampires" That dropped the number of websites down to 18 million "Werewolf" 11,400,000 hits He chewed a plastic pen cap for a few moments, then he tried it as "vampire folklore" which eliminated most of the film and fiction references and that dropped it down to 773,000 sites On a whi the word "university," hoping to score experts That dropped it down even further to 276,000 sites, and fro for thesis papers, studies, published works, and for naain: J N Corbiel, an assistant professor of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania

Newton recognized that name and pulled open his file drawer for the folder of notes he’dhis intervieith Crow He riffled the pages until he found one whose contents jarred him One he’d read but put out of his o? The printout was a historical account of a man named Peeter Stubbe, known in folklore as the Werewolf of Bedburg, athe most famous olf trial in history Under brutal torture Stubbe confessed to having been a sorcerer and lycanthrope who had practiced black e wolf for the purpose of hunting huave the many aliases Stubbe used over the years: Peter Stubb, Peter Stumpf, Abel Greenwyck, Abel Griswald…and Ubel Griswold

His skin crawled

There was a URL on the printout and he typed it in, bringing up a page with a lot of history about that and similar olf trials, most of which had been conducted by the Inquisition Dr Corbiel had a typically dry and detailed academic style, but the case details were nonetheless bloody and sensational

Newton sat back in his chair and considered this, tapping his lower teeth with the cap of his pen U of P was in Philly, maybe fifty, sixty miles from where he sat Maybe he could meet with this Professor Corbiel, pick his brain Pretend to be doing a story on the folklore behind the pop culture, so a pop-culture book

He looked for an e-mail address and found it on the staff directory, and clicked on it to load an e-mail screen [email protected] / /

"Dear Professor Corbiel," he began

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