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Mr. D got the vase ready, uncapping it and holding it under the Omega’s hand. Flames burst up from the heart, and a stream of ash fell into the vessel.

“Get the buckets,” the Omega said.

Mr. D capped the vase and put it in the corner, then went into a bag and pulled out four red Rubbermaid buckets, the kind his mama had called sloppers. He positioned one under each of the vampire’s arms and legs as the Omega went around and opened cuts in the wrists and ankles to drain the body of blood. It was amazing how fast the vampire’s skin lost its color, moving through the spectrum past white into a bluish gray.

“The serrated knife now.”

Mr. D didn’t waste his effort on the blade’s plastic lockdown. The Omega burned right through the thing, then took the knife and put his free hand down on the table. Curling his fingers into a fist, the master sawed through his own wrist, the sound as sharp as if he were working through aged hardwood. When he was finished, he passed the knife back, picked up his hand, and placed it inside the empty chest.

“Be of good cheer, my son,” the Omega whispered as another hand appeared at the blunt end of his forearm. “You shall feel mine blood course through you in but a moment.”

With that, the Omega streaked the other knife across his newly formed wrist and held the wound over the black fist.

Mr. D remembered this part from his own induction. He’d screamed in what had been more than physical pain. He’d been duped. So duped. What he’d been promised weren’t like what he’d received, and the agony and terror had made him pass out. When he’d done woke up, he’d been something else entirely, a member of the living dead, an impotent, roaming body doing evil work.

He’d thought it was just a gang. He’d thought what would happen to him was just going to be some hazing and maybe a branding to mark that he was in with them.

Didn’t know that he were never getting out. Or that he wouldn’t be human no more.

Whole thing reminded him of something his mama used to say: If you make a deal with a copperhead, you can’t be surprised you get bit.

All at once, the electricity went out.

The Omega stepped back and a hum started. This time it weren’t no Disney crib musical, but the calling of a great gathering of energy, an impending reaping of some unseen potential. As the vibrations grew louder, the house started to shake, dust falling from cracks in the ceiling, the buckets vibrating on the floor until they were doing the do-si-do. Mr. D thought of the bodies in the kitchen and wondered if they was dancing, too.

As he put his hands to ears and ducked his head, he got back just in time.

A blast of lightning hit the farmhouse’s roof in what had to be a direct line of contact. With the noise it made, it couldn’t have been a ricochet or the feathering off of a larger piece.

Yup, this weren’t no chip of a stone that got in your eye; this was the whole boulder landing smack down on your head.

The sound registered as pain in the ears, at least to Mr. D, and the shattering force of the impact made him wonder whether the house was going to crash in on them. The Omega didn’t have that worry, ’parently. He just looked up with Sunday-preacher zeal, all rapt and orgasmic, like he was a true believer and someone had just brought out the rattlers and the strychnine.

The lightning funneled through the house’s electrical highways, or in this case its back roads and beaten paths, and came out in a liquid shaft of brilliant yellow energy right over the body. The chandelier’s hanging wires gave it its guidance, and the vampire’s open chest with its oiled heart was the basin.

The body exploded off the table, arms and legs flapping, chest inflating. In a flash, the master blanketed the male, as if forming a second skin so that the four quadrants of flesh didn’t fly apart like blown tires.

As the lightning receded, the male hung suspended in midair with his Omega blanket shimmering in the darkness.

Time . . . stopped.

Mr. D could tell because the cheapie cuckoo clock on