The rain flowed down the spouting with the roar of a larger waterfall. Nellie decided the acoustics of the narrow alley made the rush of water sound louder than it should have. She’d only been in Prague for less than a day and already she hated the city.

She stared from under the brim of her hat at the side door of the three-story brick building with patience despite the chill of the rain. The collar of her trench coat was up and her hands were in her pockets. She saw Dr. Paine and Beau walk into the alley and she hurried to the side door and pulled out her lock picks. By the time they reached her, she had the door unlocked and the three of them entered. “Enter freely,” Beau whispered and a moment later Lucith and Sofia flew in as bats and then resumed their human forms. Without a word, the two quickly moved to a hall door and down the stairs while Beau and Nellie took up positions on either side with their handguns drawn. Dr. Paine waited a moment and then followed the vampires down the stairs. Moments later, the Nazi guards knocked out by saps to the back of their heads, Dr. Paine was kneeling over the unconscious Seth Adams. After he finished a quick examination, Dr. Paine whispered, “He’s fit to move.” Lucith motioned for Sofia to pick him up and then she led the way up the stairs followed by Sofia carrying Seth Adams and Dr. Paine bringing up the rear. At the top of the stairs, Nellie then Beau followed Dr. Paine out and down the alley and across the street to a gray lorry. The rear door swung open and all climbed inside.

The Chief snapped his watch case shut and slid it into his vest pocket. “Under four minutes and how many shots were fired, Mr. Jackson?” he asked as the van pulled away from the curb and away from the Nazi safehouse.

“None,” Beau said.

“How many dead Germans to explain to the authorities, Miss Thompson?” the Chief asked.

“Zero,” she said.

The lorry stopped at an intersection.

“Do you see there are other ways besides going in with guns blazing, killing everyone in sight, Dr. Paine?” the Chief asked with a hint of a smile though his eyes remained quite serious.

“I suppose your method might work at times,” the Doctor sniffed, his proper New England accent more pronounced than usual.

“How is Seth?” Adena asked.

“Hard to say without X-rays,” the Doctor replied. “He should be fine. I would say from the bump on the back of his head they hit him with a sap and knocked him out. I was just getting ready to try to bring him around.”

“Why didn’t you bring him around down there?” she asked.

“Wanted to get him out first,” Dr. Paine said. “We wouldn’t want him to be groggy and making noise if we had to sneak out.”

“Quite right,” Adena said.

Dr. Paine broke the smelling salts under Seth’s nose. A moment later he batted Dr. Paine’s hands away.

“Are you alright?” Nellie asked. Seth looked at her in surprise.

“What are you doing here, Nellie?”

Dr. Paine helped raise Seth up to a seated position. “How many fingers am I holding up?” the Doctor asked holding up two.

Seth focused, his eyes scrunched as if in pain. “Four?”

“You most likely have a concussion,” the Doctor said.

“Nah, he was always bad at math,” Wade said from the driver’s seat.

“Do you remember what they did with the book?” Lucith asked.

“What book?” Seth asked.

“Le Mysteres des Vampyres,” Lucith answered.

“No,” Seth answered. “I don’t recall seeing it.”

“You had stolen it,” Adena said. “Did you have it when the Germans captured you?”

“The Germans captured me?” Seth repeated groggily.

“That’s enough questions for now,” Dr. Paine said. “His memory might return with some rest.”

“What if I tried to hypnotize him?” Lucith asked.

Dr. Paine shook his head. “He has a concussion. I don’t know if that would be good for him or work any way since it’s not a question of him simply forgetting what happened, but suffering trauma.”

“It is still worth trying,” Lucith said.

Dr. Paine looked sternly at her. “I forbid it with my patient,” he said.

“Let’s see if he recalls in the morning after a good night’s rest,” Adena said diplomatically. “In the meantime we are here at the hotel.”

The hotel was a large, hulking affair. A doorman opened the door of the truck as Wade pulled up and the group entered together. Beau noticed the others also examined discretely the faces of those in the lobby sitting in the chairs chatting in pairs or reading newspapers singly.

They took their keys at the counter and then the elevator boy held the gate to the elevator for them. No one spoke until they entered their rooms. Beau, Lucy, Nellie and Dr. Paine, who shared a suite, said little even after they were alone. Lucy and Dr. Paine still looked as if they were ready to continue their earlier disagreement and Beau did not speak to either of them out of loyalty to the other.

“The last time we four shared rooms we were attacked,” Nellie said as she tossed the key onto a small table.

“Arkham?” Beau asked.

“No, Cairo, this past summer,” Nellie said.

“That’s right,” Beau said. “The attacks do tend to blur together after a while. I was shot in that attack.”

“No, you were shot in Arkham,” Nellie said.

“That’s right,” Beau said. “In any event, we should be staying some place less conspicuous.”

“Adena or Arthur or both are counting on the Germans locating us so they can try to recapture Seth so we can follow one of them back to where they are hidden,” Lucith said.

“Of course,” Nellie said. “Once again we’re live bait.”

“Hopefully Sofia will have success following the Germans when they depart the house where we rescued Seth,” Lucith said. “Then the Germans will be the prey and we will be the hunters.”

As the demon Lilith, Lucith had seen countless wars. Even in the short-span of Lucy’s 65 years there were nearly constant wars fought across the British Empire. The modern war allowed for the devastation to spread rapidly over a larger area, but humans had always been brutal killers. At one time, the demon in her had reveled in the wanton slaughter. But as the hybrid of Lilith and Lucy, who still retained many of her human memories and emotions, she saw it anew. Ghouls in France and Belgium had suffered grievous losses from their cemeteries being blown up by artillery shells or cut down by machinegun fire when they sought to feed on the corpses in between the lines. Vampires were more difficult to kill, but one had died sleeping in his coffin when it was struck by an artillery barrage and decapitated him and tore his body to shreds.

What Lucy had done to the Germans in revenge in the Great War had not gone unnoticed by the other vampires and after she was found by her mortal friends, the elder vampires called a council. Though she was her queen, she had to sign a compact that vampires would not take part in the wars of mortals ever again. She had agreed readily enough because she had killed to revenge her husband’s death. But she also knew that if she did not, she could face an insurrection. While many vampires did not care about mortal affairs, many others held to their nationality. Count Dracula in particular had been proud of his national heritage. To know their queen had devastated the ranks of their fellow countrymen had galled the German, Austrian, Romanian and Turkish vampires even if her motives were not to directly aid the British Army. As queen, she had to look after all of her people. Her actions in the Great War had risked exposure of all vampires.

Now, with Nazi occultists leading organizations in search of supernatural weapons, it appeared at least some of them were seeking out vampires to either enslave through the use of necromancy such as in the book Seth had tried to steal. Potentially even worse, a captured vampire could be used by the Nazis to create their own army of vampires. This was a threat not only to mortals, but to her subjects. Ideally she would handle the situation herself with Sofia and her coven of vampires. But politically she would have to bring in at least one of the German vampires so that they would understand why she was killing Nazi agents. It would be a tricky situation requiring finesse and diplomacy. She normally preferred to use her aide-de-camp Marlowe for such delicate assignments requiring tact. Plus she did not have her admitted loathing of the Germans, mortal and vampire alike. But Marlowe was in Cairo settling the issue of succession as elder vampire there since the destruction of The Scarlet Lord.

“I need to stop at a telegraph office,” Lucith told Dr. Paine. “I shan’t be a moment.”

Dr. Paine pulled over at one at the airport and she sent off a carefully worded message to Berlin for one of her subjects to meet her in Prague.

Dr. Paine drove his car through the airport gates and parked near the hangar where Wade Clark’s planes were kept.

Wade had already taxied the plane out of the hangar and was talking to a man in coveralls when they walked up.

“The others are on board,” Wade said. “I also have clean American passports for each of you.”

Wade looked at Sofia. “Except for you,” he said.

“That is not a problem,” she said, motioning with her small purse. “I have my papers.”

Onboard the plane, the Chief and a small, gray-haired woman chatting with him rose as Lucith and the others boarded. Lucith embraced the woman and the Chief.

“I did not know you were joining us, Adena,” Lucith said to the older woman.

“Seth is one of the best in my department,” Adena said. “I am glad you are going with us.”

“Any word on where he is being held by the Nazis?” Lucith asked.

“One of our people in Berlin intercepted a communiqué that he was in a German safe house in Prague,” Adena said. “The Germans are sending a specialist to question him.”

Lucith turned to Arthur. “I was going to forbid you coming on this trip, but I shan’t waste my breath.”

“Why should I not?” Lord Godalming said.

“At your age, Arthur?” she said, holding his hand. “You just turned 70. I threw you a party, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” he said. “I’m barely older than you, if you recall.”

“In any event I’ll need your wisdom and guidance,” Lucith said. “This will not be easy.”

The Chief looked at her keenly. “You’re worried about your German subjects.”

“Certainly,” Lucith said. “I just faced one insurrection. I damn well don’t need another.”

“T’sk, t’sk, your language,” Adena said scoldingly.

“Sorry,” Lucith said.

“I don’t know who or what has been the worst influence on her, the demon Lilith or her American friends,” the Chief said. “I suspect the Americans.”

Lucith introduced Adena to the Americans and Sofia. They had taken their seats. Wade closed the hatch and walked up the aisle to the cockpit. A moment later the engines fired up. Minutes later they were taxiing down the runway and were airborne on their way to Prague.

Sorry for the long hiatus – many profound changes in my personal life this summer. But horror blogging is in my blood and as all vampires and vampire fans know, the blood is the life.

Fairy figurines fill a knickknack shelf, and paintings of fairies hang from the soft-toned walls. Statues of dolphins leap from a cream-colored carpet, and goldfish gurgle in a tank just behind a chair. A yard-long see-through candleholder with a dozen flickering votives is angled across Arison’s desk, looking like it connects to Kabbalah or the Upanishads or Area 51 or Something Larger Than Us, but which she says is there just because.

But the biggest jolt comes from the woman in the executive chair: Arison — billionaire ($2.7 by Forbes’s most recent estimate), perhaps the richest woman in the Middle East, a major force in Israeli philanthropy — claims that she can see the future.

This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also “saw the writing on the wall” before the global economic crash. Reading about Arison’s extrasensory perception makes you ache for a heads-up, maybe a blog entry or a tweet or a phone call to Brownie or Greenspan or somebody who might have helped.

Arison explains that she has finally dropped the fear that has held her back from doing more about what she has perceived. Armed with the insight gained through work with Florida-based psychiatrist Brian Weiss, a proponent of regression therapy and the exploration of (take your pick) deep memories or past lives, she says she is ready to go public with her visions and bring together her spiritual and business goals.

“Dr. Weiss told me during these meetings that one day I will have a significant role in world peace, but at that time I did not know what he was talking about and I could not cope with the idea,” Arison writes in “Birth: When the Material and Spiritual Come Together,” published in Hebrew as a hybrid memoir, corporate vision statement and collection of speeches.

Dr. Paine knocked on the door to Beau’s flat with loud, repeated raps.

With an expert touch, Nellie pushed on the door in several places. “Barred from the inside,” she said. “Picking the lock won’t help.”

Dr. Paine banged on the door louder. “Beau, we know you’re in there, answer the door,” he called out.

“Go away!” Beau said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“The Germans have captured Seth,” Dr. Paine said. “He’s in Prague. The Chief has a plane ready to fly us there at once to rescue him.”

“I’m sure they just want to ask him a few questions,” Beau responded.

Dr. Paine and Nellie looked at each other in confusion. Nellie pressed her ear to the keyhole.

“He’s with her,” Nellie said, emphasizing the way she said her. Dr. Paine knew who Nellie meant.

“Seth has saved your life more than once,” Dr. Paine said pointedly.

“A fact I’m very, very, very appreciative of at the moment,” Beau replied.

“He might be tortured,” Dr. Paine said in exasperation.

“Seth’s undergone torture before,” Beau said breathlessly.

“He was caught stealing a book called ‘Mysteries of the Vampires,’ or something like that,” Nellie shouted through the door.

Nellie and Dr. Paine heard loud whispered protestations from Beau then Lucith’s voice from the other side of the door, “Beau, we must rescue Seth at once. He is your dear friend.”

Dr. Paine could hear Beau’s sigh through the door.

“Very well,” Beau called to the door. A moment later the door opened and Beau stood aside as he finished pulling up his suspenders and threw on a shirt. Lucith and another female vampire stood next to each other.

“Hello, Doctor, Nellie,” Lucith said in greeting. “This is Sofia.”

Sofia, stopped brushing her short, brunette hair long enough to smile at them, her pointed fangs white against her scarlet lips. Beau slid on a jacket, grabbed the kit he kept ready in his hall closet, threw on his hat and held the door for the others.

“Nellie, don’t look so reproachful,” Beau said as she passed him without speaking. “Where was Seth captured again?”

“Prague,” Dr. Paine said.

“That’s a strange coincidence,” Beau said. “Sofia is from Prague.”

Beau introduced them to the dark-haired vampire.

“It appears our fates are tied together once again,” Lucith said to Nellie. “Sofia came to alert me that the Germans have a secret operation to find and capture vampires for diabolical experimentation.”

Doe-eyed Sofia nodded. Beau was surprised by how easily Sofia could look so innocent. Not for the first time he thought that the greatest danger posed by vampires was by how they could look human and fool people with their masks.

“Sofia and Lucith were departing for Prague in the morning,” Beau said in explanation.

“You’re welcome to work with us,” Dr. Paine told the vampires. “The Chief and two others from the British Library are coming as well.”

“Librarians?” Beau asked.

“Department of Acquisitions for the Special Collection,” Dr. Paine answered.

“Oh well that’s different,” Beau said.

“Arthur is going with you?” Lucith asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Paine said as they walked to his car. “The political situation in Prague is rather delicate at the moment and he thought he better supervise this operation personally. Since the events in Cairo, he doesn’t trust us with the delicate work.”

“You should have forbid his coming,” Lucith said worriedly. “He is too old for this.”

“He’s the Chief,” Dr. Paine said. “We’re just employees.”

“I won’t stand for it,” Lucith said.

Dr. Paine knew that the living Lucy Westenra had been engaged to marry Lord Godalming, the Chief of their organization that fought against supernatural and eldritch horrors. The Chief had built the organization in response to Lucy’s death and transformation into a vampire. The relationship between the two was long and deep and complex, the Doctor knew.

The drive to the airport did not take long. Beau sat in the back with Lucith and Sofia.

“What was your friend doing in Prague?” Sofia asked Beau in her accented English.

“Seth is part of a British Library staff that specializes in acquisition of books and relics that could contain dangerous knowledge,” Beau said.

“What kind of books?” Sofia asked.

“Like the Necronomicon,” Lucith answered.

Sofia nodded. “I have heard of it,” she said.

“The Germans have expressed interest in acquiring such knowledge so the British Museum works to find the books first so they can be locked safely away in a vault,” Lucith said.

“Not destroyed?” Sofia asked. Beau liked the way certain letters rolled off her tongue.

“No, they might hold important rituals or clues that can be useful in the future,” Beau said.

“Why would the Germans want to capture vampires?” Sofia asked Lucith. “How would their government even know of us?”

“It is difficult to say,” Lucith said.

Beau looked at her pointedly, but Lucith did not meet his eyes. Beau knew from Lucith’s history how the Germans would have known. During the Great War, Lucy had slain more than 1,000 Germans in the trenches of France after she had found her husband’s corpse. He had enlisted in the British Army in 1914 and in 1915 he was killed while visiting a friend at an artillery observer outpost. A few Germans who found the corpses, particularly those from the rural regions, must have suspected what had killed the soldiers.

“An army of their own vampires, ruthless, highly effective killers, would seem ideal to the German high command for their upcoming world war,” Beau said.

“Their upcoming world war?” Sofia asked. “Surely it will not come to that again?”
Nellie turned in her seat and looked pointedly at Beau.

“You might be right,” Beau said quietly.

Now it was his turn to look away to avoid Dr. Paine’s gaze in the rear view mirror.

Lucith noticed the silent exchange between the three, but did not speak because she knew she too held her own secrets for a reason. But she did find it curious. In the bond formed by drinking the blood of mortals, she gained many of their memories. But in drinking the blood of Nellie and Beau, she knew there were some memories that were walled up from her. Why did Nellie and Dr. Paine look at Beau as they did when he mentioned the “upcoming world war?” Certainly many suspected the Germans intended another world war and would not be stopped with their recent actions. But they had looked at him as if he had almost revealed a secret.