Seymour took his time coming up with an answer. He drew in a deep breath without being obvious about it, consciously hiding the way his heart wanted to leap out of his chest. He kept his eyes fixed on Darnold, who remained standing over there on the far side of the kill room with its inefficiently-placed plastic dropcloth. The vampire waited beside the narrow door to the broom closet, still wearing an expression Seymour couldn’t quite discern.

  “Through this door is a demonic blood gate,” he had just said. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  What’s his game? Seymour wondered. Is he trying to figure out if I remember the time he kidnapped me away to a foreign universe? Like, trying to figure out if I’m on to him?

  A cascade of potential actions and their likely outcomes flashed across his mind. He could of course confront Darnold Youngman right there and then for having abducted him months back, but that felt like the option with the worst odds of ending well, particularly if doing so led to a fight or whatnot. He had no idea what this vampire might be capable of, combat-wise – but every piece of Earth-media Seymour had ever seen on the subject suddenly felt like a warning.

  On the other hand, rather than confronting the vampire directly, Seymour could try to bluff his way out of whatever the bloodsucker had planned. He could react to Darnold’s sudden mention of the blood gate with equal parts shock and revulsion – like any normal person would. He could use it as an excuse to flee the shop entirely. Of course, Darnold might still murder him before he could complete his escape. Sanguine Sight had confirmed that vampires could possess super speed, after all. Running for his life would probably prove futile.

  But while Seymour hesitated, busy mentally calculating his odds of survival, Darnold seemed ready to move on. He suddenly pulled open the door to the broom closet and the space beyond it seemed impossible; an expansive stone-walled chamber far larger than the cozy little antique shop should have been able to accommodate. A brightly burning torch had been mounted on the wall just inside, and Seymour could make out the bottom steps of a winding, stone staircase at the far edge of the light.

  Was it some kind of dungeon? That might make sense. In fact, the way the space seemed to be too big to fit within what he’d seen of Uncle Rick’s shop from the outside evoked memories of the hedge maze.

  “So yeah, here’s the basic gist of it,” Darnold explained matter-of-factly. “Back in the eighties, your uncle Rick built this place right on top of what the experts call a demonic blood gate.”

  His words didn’t sink in right away. A moment before, Seymour had been certain he was about to become a murder victim, and now he found himself fixated instead on the impossibly large space inside what had mere seconds earlier appeared to be nothing more than a tiny broom closet, with a door too narrow for a grown man to pass through unless he turned his shoulders sideways.

  And then that was exactly what Darnold did. Before Seymour could react in any way, the vampire lawyer twisted his way through the doorway and took down the torch. He gestured with it for Seymour to follow and the flame whooshed. “Come on. Don’t worry, the gate is inert at the moment, but it’s important that I show you how to turn it on and off in case anything weird happens while I’m not around.”

  He started up the steps before Seymour could say anything.

  The question immediately became: should he really follow a goddamned vampire up this winding staircase that looked like something out of a goddamned dungeon? A vampire who Seymour strongly suspected had already kidnapped him once? Of course not. He shouldn’t follow that dude anywhere, let alone into a straight up dungeon-coded broom closet.

  But he didn’t really have a choice, did he? He was doing due diligence here; learning about the blood gate he’d inherited, and which he and Penny fully intended to use as soon as possible to return to Heschia.

  Maybe it could actually wind up being a stroke of good luck that Darnold had turned out to be a supernatural bloodsucker. Seymour hadn’t really come here to appraise the antique shop, after all. He’d made the journey to Manitou Valley with the blood gate as his lone concern. If Darnold were just some normie ass lawyer dork, then Seymour probably would have only been given a normie ass dork tour. This way, with a legit magical monster as his guide, it appeared he would at least be led directly to the Moonlight Express—the object of his true interest—without needing to maintain the false pretense that he cared about the shop.

  And that fact—the fact that Seymour genuinely couldn’t have cared less about the million-dollar piece of mountain real estate he was about to receive—suddenly struck him as weirder even than the existence of a vampire lawyer. A couple busy months in Heschia had completely altered his priorities.

  The Seymour you used to be would have been super stoked to inherit this place, but now you’re all hung up on finding a blood gate so you and your mostly-platonic ladyfriend can return to her universe, mostly just so you can both keep your jobs in a big box magic shop.

  And as his mind reconciled the reality before him with his strong desire to dissociate, Seymour suddenly realized that Darnold hadn’t paused for so much as a single second in his ascent up the staircase. In no time at all he’d gone up around the bend and the light from the torch he took with him began to dim. If Seymour waited any longer, he’d be following this vampire in perfect darkness.

  “Hey, wait up!” He sped into the closet and up the steps, taking them two at a time. “Could we just hit pause here for a second?”

  As he hustled to catch up, it occurred to him that he’d been on this staircase before. Not because he suddenly possessed any actual memories of the event, but simply because he suspected that the gate would be somewhere at the top – and he knew that he had traveled through it before.

  Last time, though, Darnold must have used his vampire powers to put you in a trance or whatever.

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  Seymour stopped in his tracks. He stood in perfect darkness on the spiraling stairs. And it just hit him then like a bolt of lightning: this shit was all too much. The time had come to haul ass out of there.

  The risks here were simply too ridiculous. Who knew what this vampire intended to do with him – but it couldn’t be good. And it had probably gone wrong the last time they met, hadn’t it? When Seymour thought about it for even one second, whatever Darnold’s plan had been those months ago when he forced his captive through the gate, it probably hadn’t come to fruition. Fate had somehow intervened and led him to Hedwick’s Home for Wayward Aliens, instead of wherever Darnold had meant for him to end up. The simple truth was: trusting a vampire who had already kidnapped him once before was something only a character in a horror movie would do.

  One of those really annoyingly dumb-assed characters. Straight up vampire food.

  Seymour would just need to think of some other way to perform the required reconnaissance of the Moonlight Express. He pulled his phone from his pocket, turned on its flashlight, and scrambled back down the winding staircase with the device held out in front of him like it was a crucifix.

  Now that he could see a little better, Seymour noticed that the stairs were made of a material he recognized – the same dark, green volcanic glass he’d seen outside Dragon Dan’s Adventure Depot; the same strange, obsidian-like stone that the entrance to Vol’kara’s dungeon was made from.

  His teeth began full-on chattering now from the onslaught of adrenaline. How had he let himself get suckered into such an obvious trap? As he plunged deeper into the darkness, his mind’s eye couldn’t stop picturing a pale-skinned, black-haired, buck-naked vampire version of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, dancing in front of the mirror with his junk all tucked back. It was just like Seymour’s opportunistic imagination to turn a potentially deadly situation into something a little more culturally relevant. But while the part of his brain that remained rational held serious doubts that Darnold wanted to make a skin suit out of him, he couldn’t discount the idea altogether.

  When he arrived at the bottom of the staircase he groaned upon discovering that the narrow closet door he and Darnold Youngman had entered through only moments earlier was no longer where he’d left it. Not believing his eyes, he felt along the wall like maybe the door was written in braille or something but the surface was perfectly smooth from top to bottom, made from the same weird, obsidian-like stone as the rest of the staircase. It was as if the door had never existed.

  “Well, shit.”

  “Going someplace?” Seymour flinched and dropped his phone. It clattered on the stone floor. That voice was so close—the bloodsucker’s lips must have been right next to his ear—but he felt no warmth from his breath. The bastard hadn’t made even the slightest sound coming back down the steps.

  With nowhere to make an escape, Seymour was forced to commit another of the most troped-out cardinal sins of the horror genre: he swung his elbow and shoved past the monster to book it back up the stairs, abandoning the light of his phone. He heard himself begging no no no. His escape became even more panicked as the stairwell suddenly filled with a chorus of slapping and screeching sounds.

  It took him a moment, but Seymour’s skin crawled as he realized there were now dozens or perhaps hundreds of small bats infesting the stairwell. A whole cloud of the screeching creatures kept pace with him as he fled and scrambled and at times even crawled on all fours up the unevenly-chiseled steps. They hissed and harassed and slapped him with their leathery wings the entire way.

  At the top he flopped out of the stairwell onto a flat landing made again of the same dull, volcanic glass. A pin-prick of light shone in from high above—just enough to impose a gloomy twilight upon the otherwise pitch blackness—and Seymour could make out the walls of a wide, circular chamber. It reminded him in a way of the yurt which he and Penny had rented on the edge of town, but this was more like a yurt built for the Devil.

  Some sort of large, boxy contraption sat on the floor in the middle of the room. A pipe or tube of some sort extended off of it and reached almost to the ceiling. He squinted; it might have been a fancy church organ or a piano fitted with a periscope or something.

  He realized then that the bats which had been chasing him up the stairs only a moment earlier had seemingly disappeared and even as the thought registered Darnold suddenly returned, now standing a few feet further into the strange, round-walled chamber. Fire flared in the darkness and Seymour cringed away, but it was only the torch from before, still held by the vampire lawyer and reignited as if by magic.

  “Little jumpy, aren’t you?” Darnold strolled forward with uncanny casualness and offered a hand up which Seymour felt helpless but to accept. The lawyer’s touch was cold as a corpse sunk at the bottom of a lake in the winter. He pulled Seymour to his feet with emasculating ease.

  “Uh, thanks.” Seymour rubbed his hand to cure the cold and the crushed feeling.

  “Alright, so, where were we before you got all weird on me and tried to run away? Oh, right: demonic blood gates.” He nodded, pale face illuminated by the torchlight. “A demonic blood gate is a portal that can be used to travel to other worlds. And universes; possibly other dimensions. I’m not one-hundred percent clear on all the stuff it can do, to be perfectly honest, but I do know that the way you unlock it on this side is by feeding it a couple drops of human blood.”

  Seymour felt a little dizzier with every successive word of that explanation. “I’m sorry, Darnold,” he said while massaging his brow, suddenly distracted by an intrusive thought. “What did you say your last name was again?”

  “Youngman.”

  “For real?”

  “Something wrong with that?” An undeniable trace of amusement played in his voice.

  “I’m just saying, that’s your real name?” Seymour enunciated each syllable individually: “Darn. Old. Young. Man?”

  The so-called lawyer smiled. “What do you make of that?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know how you get away with it.”

  “Get away with what, exactly?”

  “You know, walking around looking the way you do, and calling yourself darn old young man. How has no one figured out what you are?”

  “And what, dare I ask, do you think I am?” Darnold’s grin widened. “Say it out loud.”

  “Well, I mean, you’re a goddamned vampire.”

  “You seem unusually chill about that revelation.”

  “That’s probably because I know we’ve already met once before.”

  “Have we?” Darnold’s eyes twinkled with what Seymour could only describe as mischievous curiosity. “And when did we meet prior?”

  “When you straight up kidnapped me to the other world.”

  “Wait,” the vampire shook his head, “what do you mean by kidnapped? I can tell you’ve been to Heschia before because you’ve got those Virtue Sigils on your palms – but are saying someone took you there against your will?”

  But before Seymour could answer, something suddenly crashed into Darnold Youngman like a meteor, and he exploded once more into a swarm of bats.