I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t tell if you’re five or twenty-five.”

“I’m this many.” Tori held up seven fingers with pride. Two rolled her eyes. Tori picked a random number of fingers each time her age came up.

“Tori, Sarah can’t see that, and it doesn’t matter anyway since you’re making it up. It’s hard to explain, Sarah. She’s sort of both, really.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Don’t suppose you’d care to explain that, either?”

“No, but I figure you’re probably going to make me eventually, so I guess I might as well. Let’s wait for Rhes.”

“I get the impression there’s a lot you’re not telling us, Two.”

“Centuries worth.”

Sarah raised her eyebrows, but Two didn’t elaborate. Rhes returned with the drinks, handed Two her beer, sat down on the piano bench.

“Way to steal my seat, dear,” He said to Sarah.

“Your fault for offering to get the drinks, sweetie.” Sarah’s was grinning, the slightest hint of sarcasm in her voice. She turned to Tori. “Where are you from, Tori?”

“I came from a big house. It was full of stuff but mostly I lived outside.”

“Outside?”

“Yeah. In the woods.”

“Oh, jeez...” muttered Two. “We don’t know where she’s from. She only remembers the last place she lived, for now.”

“Right. The last place she lived. Out in the woods. What the hell, Two?”

Two rolled her eyes, drank from her bottle of beer, looked around the room for a moment. “You’re not going to let me not tell you this... are you?”

Sarah spread her hands. Waddaya want from me? Rhes said nothing.

Two sighed. “Okay. I... fuck it. Here goes. When it’s done, you can call the loony bin and have Tori and me committed. I’ll start by saying that I can prove this, if I have to. I can take you to where the mansion was. I can show you what I took from there. I can dig down to... to Theroen, and show him to you, if I have to.”

“Theroen?”

“Let me tell it. It’s going to take a while.”

“Okay, Two.”

Two took a breath, gathered her thoughts, and began. “It started on a regular night, I guess. As regular as it gets, anyway...”

* * *

The story took three and a half hours to tell. By the time she finished, Sarah looked pale and shaken. Rhes looked dazed, like someone had hit him in the head with a sledgehammer. Two couldn’t meet their eyes. She was shaking, needed a cigarette, and thought she might very soon begin weeping.

“Questions?” She asked, trying for humor and finding little. Her throat hurt, that muscle ache at the back that comes with holding back tears, or talking through them.

Sarah ran a hand through her hair, exhaled as if just remembering that she needed to breathe, flopped back against the cushions of the couch. “I have approximately seven hundred billion questions, Two.”

“That’s about half as many as I have. I can’t answer most of them, Sarah. I didn’t have very long to learn.”

Rhes spoke up. “I have one. You really believe this, Two?”

“Yeah. Yes. I really do. I suppose it’s possible that I’ve been lying somewhere hallucinating for the past three months, but I doubt it. I don’t have any pictures, but I have the gun, and the stuff from the mansion, and Tori, who’ll back me up as best she can if you ask her.”

Rhes rested his head on one hand, staring at the floor, looking confused. “This is crazy.”

“Yes.”

“It’s... it’s fiction, is what it is,” Sarah said. She heard Two’s intake of breath, held up her hand, cut Two off. “Not your story. I don’t mean you’re lying, or making this up. I haven’t even come close to making a decision on that. I just mean the whole concept. The whole vampire thing. I want to believe you, but this isn’t the dark ages. No one buys into that stuff anymore.”

“I know. I don’t know how to prove it, short of Theroen, and I guess even if I brought you there, even he could appear to be human. Nothing I can do. All of my witnesses are dead, except Tori. I guess she’s not really that credible... but if you want to take her outside, she’ll happily lift the back end of your car six inches off the ground for you.”

“Actually, I’d say Tori’s proof even without any of that. I don’t think she’s really capable of lying. At best she’d have been hallucinating right along with you, Two... and if that’s the case, then there’d have