Violet is dead, shot by the sheriff after she tried to kill her sister Iris, Tammy, and Joe, who were celebrating their engagement. Richard, Julia's cousin was captured by other vampires who will try him on the charge of trying to recruit them for a spy agency. Quentin is looking for Adam

THE RONIN

Chapter 1

"Iris will be all right." Kenneth said softly to Julia. "She will need to stay in the hospital for a while, but she will make it."

Julia nodded, not truly interested.

"Vicky agreed to watch over Peter until Iris is ready to come home again. She thinks that she can handle it. She is in touch with Peter's previous therapist, Audrey Morton, and also with Jessica King. They think that the can handle him"

Julia nodded again. She did not hear him, Kenneth realized. Her mind was consumed with thought of Richard.

Wherever they kept him, Richard was now pleading for his life.

He might not plead well enough.

He wondered how vampires executed one of their own. Did they have any kind of a ceremony? Some sort of priest? Did they ask for any last requests?

He might find out soon. And what it would to do Julia then... Julia and her child. Barnabas said he wanted to help, and Megan had volunteered as a lawyer, in spite of her having helped abduct Richard... But what good could they do?

Richard sat, smoking a cigarette. in the cell where he was kept. There was a chain in his ankle, a specially treated metal that kept him from shape shifting or vanishing. Evidently he was not the first one held here for trial and execution. He wonder what the others in this cell had been charged with, and how it had gone for them.

He knew what the charges were, and what little chance he had to beat them.

He was innocent, but what proof could he offer of it? Ordinarily the burden of proof was on the prosecution side. But that was in the US legal system. Here the rules were different.

And when he thought of what was involved, he did not blame them. He had once lived by the same rules... he had killed by the same rules... It was not a question of guilt or innocence but whether you could allow somebody to live. And it was better not to take risks. War is Hell, after all, even a secret war carried out by the intelligence services...

And now he was facing a similar judgment, a very similar logic, and he could find no fault with it.

If only Julia had not been present. If she had not know what had happened to him...

He wondered how she was doing. Not well. Maybe later she would recover, but not after he had been executed, after she had resigned herself to it and forgotten the worst of it...

Maybe it was better for Julia's sake that he did not fight it. That it was over as soon as possible...

Death came to all, sooner or later. And for him it was later than most. He had not realized it until he had seen the white hairs in Julia. He should be an old man. He was not. He had survived when most of the people he knew had been swallowed up by a man-made monster. Why go on:? There might be no place for him in the world, anyway.

And maybe, once he was dead, he would meet Cosmo again, and would get to tell him how sorry he was.

"You got a visitor, Zimmerman." His jailer said. His jailer, a little boy of nine who could kill you without blinking.

It was not Julia, as he had feared. - Julia would be capable of browbeating and demanding and banging on doors until she saw Richard again. But not now. - It was Barnabas.

Barnabas looked so dejected that you would think that he was the one under a capital indictment.

"How are they treating you?" Barnabas asked.

"Not bad. I am quite comfortable, and I have known worse accommodations. Also there is a postponement at the request of my lawyer."

"You got a lawyer?" Somehow this surprised Barnabas. Yet, why should it? Vampires were recruited from all walks of life, and some lawyer might have become infected... But of course, a lawyer who could not wriggle out of trouble would not be a very skilful one...

"Ms. Graham. She self-appointed herself as my counsel. She says that she is trying to retrace my routes, and see if my presence was followed by any recruitment by the Mossad. "

"And she found anything?"

"She needs to find nothing. She needs to show that wherever I went I did not seek to make contact with any other vampires, or that was even unaware of their presence."

"She is trying to prove a negative." He knew how tough that was.

"Yes. "

"And you are innocent."

"Of this charge, yes. I never delivered anyone to be recruited by the Mossad.. But I am quite guilty of other things...In the life I chose I had to make a lot of unpleasant decisions, and I made them... as unpleasant as the one they will make about me."

"But you did not do what they accuse you of. You did not come to Collinsport to recruit anyone."

"No. I was not. But even if I was doing it, I'd still deny it... For the record, I wanted a new start. I waned to see if there was more to life than killing for Eretz Israel, that there was more to me than being a Holocaust survivor..."

"Maybe you could convince them."

"I would not convince myself. I know how hopeless it is. Megan is trying, and maybe she will feel less guilty when it is finished. She needs to think that she is helping, and that Julia may forgive her. I told her to get out of town before Julia starts looking for her with a stake and hammer... Some things cannot be fixed."

"Have you given up?" Barnabas looked sick as he said it.

"They should have killed me outright." he grimaced. "Better for everybody. Better of Julia."

"How could it be better for Julia?"

"If I had been killed then, by now she'd be done with crying and would start accepting it. And then she'd eventually get back to normal. Instead she is being fed hope that will eventually be betrayed. And the longer it takes, the worse it will be."

"They could still believe you."

"And water could flow backwards. They'll never believe me. I know the way these decisions are made... How's Julia doing?"

"She's holding on."

"The baby all right?"

"Yes. No problems there."

"There might be if she keeps suffering from stress. Does she have problems with her husband?"

"They seem somewhat estranged."

"Figures. I was Julia's first great love. She feels that she has somewhat betrayed me by marrying Kenneth.. What about you? Has she forgiven you?""

"No. It was my party, under my roof. She believes that I was in on it. I tried to convince her, but she won't believe me." There was desolation in Barnabas' voice, as he contemplated the possible end of that friendship.

"Did the matter of the Woodman arise between you to?"

"Not explicitly. Not yet." Barnabas was amazed at Richard's perception. "But it will come out soon. And when that happens... I offered her to resign if she was uncomfortable having me around... But I guess that she is more comfortable to have me where she can yell at me"

"Does she yell at you now?"

"Yes."

"So you see why I have to be executed quickly with a minimum of fuss.."

'You cannot want that."

"No. I don't I would like to go free. But that's not likely to happen. Even if I escaped (and I toyed with the idea) they'd hunt me down, and when they caught me, they will not capture me, they'd just kill me. No, better to have a clean end for it. I don't think that they make my death a lingering one."

Barnabas shook his head.

"There is no other solution. That's why I try to tell Ms. Graham to stop playing Perry Mason and that she bow to the inevitable. She does not need to ease her conscience by acting as my lawyer."

"She wants to."

"But I don't want her to!"

"But you are innocent."

"Innocent., guilty... those are just words in my world. I may be innocent of this, I am guilty of other things, and I might well deserve death for them."

Barnabas dropped his head in his hands... "It cannot be. You must live,,, you must!"

"It can't be. Why not just let it happen?"

"Because I can't. Because Julia is my dearest friend, and she hates me for this..."

"For Julia's sake, you should let me die in peace."

"You are leaving town?" George asked Megan.

"I have to. Julia will kill me if I stay. Or she will force me to kill her in self-defense. Oh, I will remain in touch, but you better not let it be known that you can get me. "

"I will miss you."

"I will miss you too, and all the friends I made here. But that's what being a vampire means. Having to leave in a hurry, and drop off the grid in a New York minute... Barnabas does not understand it yet... There is much that he does not know... or hopes never to know... I would worry about the Mossad getting to him, but he is such a klutz that they will not recruit him. Just mention that my instructions to him in my operations was 'keep out of it or I'll hurt you bad." They can figure out why."

"He's going through a bad tine."

"Yes. And he may need some though love. I was the one who kept him in line regularly, locking him in his coffin and lecturing him when he made a bad decisions. The job now falls to you. Do not be gentle if you do. It takes a two by four to get his attention when he is in a mood like this."

"