The presence of one of my kind should have come as no surprise to me, none at all. But it surprised me, nonetheless. Lord knows, I didn't know every blood drinker in the world, or anything even close to it. But I knew many by sight. This was not one of them.

Then it dawned on me. The Bronx was awash with blood drinkers, or so it appeared. What was the chance that those drinkers were native to that part of the city? Or had they come from elsewhere? Perhaps from foreign climes? Perhaps they came with this new wave of Russian criminals.

Either way, I should have seen that coming. It was just so obvious. The sudden appearance and extreme brutality of this group had the stamp of blood drinkers, the most reckless and ruthless of our kind. My dead enemy Whitefarrow had had his thumb in no few criminal pies. It was only reasonable that his death would have created a vacuum of some sort.

At least I knew what I was dealing with now, and I had no intention of dallying around. I walked up to the table and looked at the 4 normal folk who were sitting there and said in my primitive Russian, "You lot, get the fuck out of here."

All four of them seemed surprised, and there was something in the way they looked at me that made me believe either they weren't interested in obeying me or they hadn't understood my words. Okay. There was a universal language known by every lacky who ever had bent the knee. I struck the nearest one a powerful blow across the nose with the edge of my right hand.

The fury of the music behind me didn't notice as the fool slipped to the floor, dead. The universe and the dancing went on. In a voice even louder, I commanded. "You lot, get the fuck out of here!"

The remaining mortal men fled, as if for their lives. For that indeed was the case.

I then turned my attention to the blood drinker who remained sitting at the table. The fellow seemed somewhat surprised by my presence and by my actions. My kind usually could identify another of us at a glance. For the first few seconds, until I'd extinguished his lackey, this fellow had seemed unaware of what I was. If I wasn't dealing with a youngster, then I would have been surprised.

It all made perfect sense.

Something welled up inside of me. There was not a security camera to be seen in this place. And not a single person would dare report anything they saw here to the authorities, not ever. Something wicked and unchained was in me, a sense of abandon and recklessness. Yes, at last, I knew with what I was dealing.

"What are you doing in my city?" I demanded of the blood drinker who sat in front of me.

"You don't want to make a scene, here," was his terse reply in heavily accented English.

The fellow glared at me, and I looked back, taking a careful estimation of him while I did. Was this the boss, then? Or was he part of a wider clique of blood drinkers, one of whom was behind the whole Russian affair?

That he was a youngster was increasingly obvious. An older blood drinker either would have welcomed me with a drink or already would have tried to kill me. Besides, the fellow's gaudy suit and silly affectations (the slicked back hair and garish pinky ring) told me he'd learned what he thought he knew about being a blood drinker from watching Hollywood movies.

"What are you doing in my city? Don't make me have to repeat myself again."

By that time, the doorman finally had caught up to me. Before the fellow could say or do a thing, I snatched up a handful of his hair and bounced his face off the table. My blow wasn't enough to kill him, just enough to shut him up.

My new blood drinker friend didn't appear to know what to do. His kind were accustomed to slapping around normal folk. Had he ever faced another blood drinker, one who was angry and set on violence?

"I don't know who the fuck you think you are," he spat out, "but this isn't your ...."

I flipped the table aside, surged forward, and hit him in the throat as hard as I was able. Why I hadn't done so from the start escaped me. But I'd had just about all the shit I was going to take. This was my city. Period.

The punch I gave him was my hardest blow, but it didn't kill the fellow. It did render him helpless for the moment. As I have schooled you before, few of my kind ever felt the need to learn how to defend themselves in a fight.

I yanked the idiot from the seat where he now gasped for air and hurled him out onto the dance floor, where he collided with a dozen or more partiers. Moments later, I raked him out of the mess of flailing arms and legs and squealing disco queens.

The fellow yanked free of my grip and hurled himself at me, his hands shooting for my throat. Such a move might have worked on one of his victims, but I caught his closest arm, pivoted to the right, and threw him into an arm bar. We then capered about the room, almost like dancers might, as he tried to wrestle free of my iron grip and I struggled to keep him in line.

He was bigger than I first had thought, a good three inches taller than me, and he was strong. But as I've said, I was wicked strong myself and ended up wrenching him around in such a way that I smashed his head several times into an iron railing near the front door.

I likely would have kept bashing his head like that until either his head or the railing gave way, but shots erupted nearby. I ducked, smashed the idiot's head one final time, and then turned and leapt in the direction from which the bullets flew.

A stray round caught me in the shoulder, and another in the thigh. I would require some cleaning later, but such wounds, though painful, meant very little to me. I found the fool who was shooting, snatched the pistol from his hand, and shoved him down onto a bench near the dancefloor.

"You work for me, now," I told the man in plain English. "Anybody else shoots at me tonight, and I snap your neck."

The fellow nodded his understanding.

I turned back to where I'd left his erstwhile master only to find the fellow no longer there. The blood drinker was dashing toward the front door so quickly that I barely saw him. Clearly, I had not brained him as severely as I had intended, and I took off after him at a run, tossing and shoving screaming partiers aside as I did.

The front door of the place by that time was empty, and I arrived just as the creature I was pursuing made his getaway. As further proof of his youth, the idiot chose to leap into the nearest car and race away. A car? Any self-respecting blood drinker would have fled across the rooftops, but ... well.

I opted not to chase after the fool. Keeping up with an auto in normal city traffic was no trial. But at the speeds that idiot was racing, it would be hit or miss whether I could follow. Better simply to find one of his lackeys, several of whom were still in the nightclub, and to convince them that it would be in their best interest to give me a hand.

The place by then was emptying rapidly, and I went back inside to find a small knot of thugs talking in nervous whispers near where I had first encountered the blood drinker. The men saw me, and it took less than a moment for them to find their courage and raise their weapons, all except for the man whose pistol I had confiscated. He jumped to the side with an hysterical, "No, no, no!"

I still had the pistol in my hand and squeezed off three rounds, each round striking one of the men arrayed against me. All were clean head shots. God bless Corey Wanchek and our hours at the shooting range.

"Do you want a second chance?" I asked the only man still standing, the fellow whose weapon I had taken. In truth, none of the men I'd just killed had managed to get off a shot at me, so I chose to let this man live.

The chap was ashen with fear and merely nodded to the affirmative.

"Good," I said. "Take me to wherever that idiot who just left is going."