Bartolome De Triana burst into the lobby of the Eternal Acres and made a beeline to the reception desk. I followed in his shadow, moving his handkerchief around my face morosely, still shell-shocked to hear I was a sacrifice.

Luckily, Bartolome had enough vivacity for a dozen people. "Lilian, you look ravishing!" the vampire cried out. "I don't know how you do it! What's your secret?"

The pants bunched in a thousand folds over his decrepit butt; his mane was unkempt, and he looked centuries old, but somehow he pulled off a believable ladies' man. I was happy Cruz didn't take after his grandpa, but Lilian blushed. "Ageless beauty, Monsignor, that's all it is to it."

"No, no!" He shielded his eyes, leaning on the desk and beaming at her with admiration. "Whoever bestowed agelessness upon you, must have cheated! You were given a much more precious gift, that of forever growing loveliness."

"If only there was such a thing!" She giggled and tacked a perfect spiral curl behind her ear.

Bartolome licked his lips.

"I have an arduous task of explaining to my guest how special my grandson is." He waved in my approximate direction, not taking his smoldering gaze off Lilian. "Of course, to meet Cruz is to love him, but it is paramount she understands the obligations of dating one of our kind as well. So...I need some liquid inspiration, Lilian, and since your beauty only rivals your kindness—"

"Aha, that is what you are really after, old rascal! The elixir! It's always elixir with you."

Lilian rolled in her chair to a bar fridge behind her and extracted a plastic bottle, the kind they use for liquid yogurt drinks. She shook it in the air, and Bartolome's neck stretched, his gaze following the bottle like a magnet.

"Take it, take it Monsignor." She extended the bottle, but snatched it away when Bartolome reached for it with a dizzying speed.

Bartolome pouted. "You should be ashamed of yourself for teasing a poor, frail old man."

Lilian laughed, like he made a joke. "So frail, you're ready to flirt all day long."

"In my youth, paying courtship to a lady was a sign of good manners. Would you judge me for it?"

"I guess not," Lilian sighed. "And I'll give the elixir to you..." Bartolome's smile became triumphant, but she froze it off with a tat-tat-tat. "I'll give it to you, if you stop pestering me for more until the end of the month. My stores are for emergencies only."

"I swear on my beloved Clarissa's grave." Bartolome pressed his hand to his heart and his eyes watered. Which didn't interfere with his reflexes at all when he caught the bottle out of the air. "Thank you, kind Lilian!"

The speed of this transaction was unbelievable, however I didn't have time to ask if Lilian was also a vampire.

Bartolome charged down the hall. It goes without saying that he pulled me along, like I was some barge. We turned the corner, zipped up the stairs to the second floor so fast wind plugged my mouth, and we didn't stop going until we were in front of Room 11.

There, he dropped me, chugged back the thick red liquid from the bottle, then bent over the door lock. His fingers traced inch-sized patterns in the air. Each one glowed blue, stretched to ten times that, then popped into a shower of sparks and dissipated, creating room for the next one.

Save for the crackling of Bartolome's runes, the hall was deathly quiet.

"Do you think Cruz is inside Freida's room?" I asked, trying and failing to keep the quiver from my voice.

"Don't be ridiculous," Bartolome replied grouchily, without pausing his work for one second. "She took her to her domain in a...a parallel universe, as you'd probably call it nowadays, but we call our ancestral homeland Necrontium. There, she could have her way with him with no danger of interruptions."

I didn't like this information at all. "If Cruz is in Necrontium, what are we doing here?"

Bartolome wiggled his fingers, this time without producing a magic symbol, but the door to Room 11 opened softly inwards on his command. "Staging that interruption, of course! After you, Señorita. After you."

With no small amount of trepidation, I stepped inside Freida's room. It had a huge TV, an overstuffed armchair, a desk with the latest gaming computer, half-a-dozen mannequins modeling ball gowns...I barely noticed a narrow cot at the corner.

"If we sleep, it's the sleep of the dead," Bartolome commented. "Then we don't care about comfort, only about survival."

He dashed around Freida's room, sniffing and spreading radar-like waves of blue glow. "She must have it somewhere..." he muttered between the pulses.

I lowered myself on the armrest of the overstuffed recliner, fighting to keep my balance, because no way I was going to sit on a bed designed for the dead. And the gaming station was just too weird in an old lady's room, even if she were a vampire. Particularly because she was a vampire!

I fidgeted. "What are you looking for, Monsignor?"

"Freida's stash," Bartolome snapped.

"Of the elixir?"

"Blood, Señorita, blood. The elixir is good for keeping alive and a few cheap tricks, but to force my way to an Ancient's sealed domain, I need the real thing. And since the only red-blooded human at the Acres is my grandson's inamorata and it would be improper—"

"Oh wow!" Don't judge, but I liked how Bartolome treated Cruz and me as a couple. Nobody before, not even my BFF showed as much respect for my feelings for him. For Esha and others it was just a crush.

"—improper to feed on in the eyes of vampires and humans."

Oh. The casual mention of vampirism dropped me from cloud nine back to Room 11. Freida already slotted me as a sacrifice. If Bartolome casually sucked my blood to power up his magic...I didn't think my sanity could take another blow.

"I...I appreciate your moral fortitude."

"I wasn't always benevolent and toothless," he gritted through his white, obviously artificial teeth. "Aha! There it is!"

The blue glow thickened under Freida's bed. Bartolome yanked the covers up and brought out a box...a chest, actually. It wasn't large, only a foot long and maybe half as tall, but it had a truncated lid and enough metal decorations to make it fit for an ancient tomb or a pirate hoard.

I slipped off the armchair and scooted over just in time for Bartolome to open his treasure after a few safety passes over the lock. Musty smell hit my nostrils. Graveyard's chill touched my cheeks, but the content of the chest wasn't decrepit in the least.

Black velvet lined the walls so thickly, it barely left any space for six bulbous vials. Each one was made of gorgeous cut crystal with a heavy stopper, shaped as a teardrop. Or, given the aesthetics, a drop of blood.

Like ancient apothecary bottles, the vials had labels hanging around their slim necks, each inscribed with a name. I bit my lip, suppressing an exclamation of horror when Bartolome emptied the blood from the first vial into his mouth.

Dylan, read the tag. I pressed my hands over my mouth, afraid to alert the feasting vampire. Calm down. Dylan is a common name. It's not him.

Bartolome picked the next bottle and smiled at me with bright-red lips. His incisors lengthened and sharpened...and that was the least significant change in his appearance.

His white mane darkened to midnight black, the gaunt cheeks lost the network of wrinkles, smoothing his look to a man in his early thirties at most. Out of nowhere, he grew a mustache, curling jauntily upward at the corners, and a chin-hugging beard.

An all-black get-up replaced the pastels...with an exception of white ruffles at the throat and wrists, as well as a golden chain hanging low on his chest. You'd think a black jacket would be somber, but it used multiple types of lustrous fabrics, had absurd shoulder pads, wide sleeves, and a plunging triangle of a...buttoned down bodice (was it a bodice? Why bows?)...

Bartolome reserved the worst for his lower body. The horrendously puffy shorts, barely covering his private parts, sat over black leggings. This would self-destruct both Delys high schools in an atomic explosion of hysterical laughter.

The only marginal improvement on Bartolome's former retiree ensemble were his shiny leather shoes.

"Dear Lord!" Despite the gravity of the situation, I couldn't hold back the giggles. "I hope we're not going out in public together. People would keep asking us if it's Halloween already, and what you're supposed to be."

Bartolome drained the bottle to the last drop before acknowledging I had spoken. "This, Señorita, is my vampiric ego, the exact person I was on the day I was bitten. It takes blood, not a synthetic elixir to keep up appearances, so we have to let ourselves go when we don't predate."

Something about the way he said it sent a chill down my spine, curing me of giggles. "Who...who were you?"

His answers came between non-stop consuming of Freida's stash of human blood.

"I was an Inquisitor, a bane of the ignorant and the unlucky in Sevilla under the pretense of serving the Lord whose name you'd just uttered in vain. It was all cruel delights and mind games to me, until one day I caught a creature of true and unimaginable darkness. She offered me immortality for escaping the stake."

"Freida," I whispered my guess.

"Yes, 'twas Freida. I let her feed, and we fled under the cover of the night. I was her Fledgling, then her companion and lover for centuries, until we drifted apart. I lost sight of her, reformed, met Clarissa...but it appears she didn't forget and wants my grandson to take my place."

Under the now empty bottles, Bartolome found a wire brooch with a single long bead of carnelian on it. "Pin this on, Señorita. Freida is too greedy of her powers to have bothered with stars in her shard of Necrontium. It'll let you see it through her darkness."

What horrid abuses this awful woman had in store for Cruz in her personal dark hell? I fastened the brooch to my blouse with trembling fingers. "Could we go save Cruz now, Monsignor?"

"Almost," he said, "I'm as high on the blood of the living as I had been since Woodstock. We just need to arm you before we open the gateway to Freida's lair."

My heart gave a lurch. Cruz, hang in there, we're coming! On the other hand...

"What do you mean, we need to arm me?" I squealed.