Felicia continued on the road.

She made her way more fully into the village. The spread-apart houses began to give way to small shops, and the dirt road became pavement. It was pretty deserted, with no one out walking and only the occasional beat-up car or bicycle. What had begun as an all-out run had terminated in a slogging trudge.

Still, Felicia couldn't stop moving. Like a shark, she had to continue, or she would die. Caspari would eat her. Like he was eating poor Vasile. Even that grumpy old man didn't deserve that. Felicia had to do something if it wasn't already too late.

Her town was a bedroom community of Bucharest. People commuted to the bigger city from the small, sleepy little countryside town. Still, even their unimportant little town had a police station.

However, she couldn't tell the police that Caspari was an undead monster feeding on the living. She watched movies, too. She was like Steve in The Blob (another movie she secretly watched with Aurelia's super cool sister). The cops would think she was pulling some joke if she told them there was a monster. She knew the police never believed you when you told them supernatural trickery was afoot. They always made excuses until they faced the aliens, monsters, mutants, and whatever else was running amuck.

Okay, think, think. What could she say to make them believe her and go there and find the moroi? It was already evening, and mama would be a nervous wreck. Mama would call Felicia's friends. And while Felicia could trust Ioana to deny everything, she knew Aurelia would meekly admit she was on someone else's property and had never returned. Mama would assume the worst (not entirely wrong). Papa would call the police, and everyone would go out looking for her when they should be looking for the moroi. For all she knew, Caspari would clean up, answer the door politely, and tell them she had run away or something. They'd believe him because he'd use his freaky moroi powers on them. Or he'd kill them all because they wouldn't go in prepared for a fight.

It was just a fact—the police were not going to believe that Evan Caspari was an undead moroi that apparently used to pal around with Death and Pestilence (as well as someone he called an idiot). They would never buy that he was carving up the local grumpy car nut in his basement. And that she found out because she sunk into his bloody garden to get a football. They would see her as a stupid little girl making up wild stories about a man who never seemed to bother anyone.

She stood under some awning by a business near the police station and tried to dry herself off, wringing the excess water from her clothes. Her mother was likely freaking out because that other kid went missing and would only focus on the fact that Felicia never came home. She lost Aurelia's scrunchie. A deranged moroi was going to eat her. Felicia pressed her hands down her shirt to smooth it out, and then she started to smooth out her jeans…

…she had Vasile's finger.

Mihail was genuinely missing. Nobody knew where he was. He probably was eaten by Caspari.

But everyone was blaming some unknown, undiscovered, mundane serial killer.

Who said she had to tell the police that Caspari was a moroi?

Felicia marched into the police station. Her still-wet shoes left puddles as she came in. It was a small station. There was a receptionist, a young man in a police uniform, at the front desk who was putting a phone down. He smiled at her as she approached but then looked concerned.

Felicia's clothes were soaked and streaked with mud from crawling in Caspari's garden. Her hair hung around her face in a messy tangle. Her face was probably pale.

Thieves don't reveal themselves to cops except when the game ends. Well, Caspari's game was over.

Reaching into her pocket, she grabbed the severed finger and shoved it on the desk.

"Evan Caspari is a serial killer," Felicia stated firmly. "I saw him dismembering Horațiu Vasile. That's his finger."

"Wha—"

"And if you're looking for Mihail," Felicia continued quickly, not allowing the cop to get a word in edgewise. "He's probably in there. There was so much blood there are probably over a dozen dead children in there."

The cop, during Felicia's speech, had put on medical gloves and grabbed the finger to examine it. It was very obviously a human finger. A recently severed finger. That smelt like garlic, but there was no helping that. Felicia was not hysterical. She was confident, bold, and knowledgeable. She was not making claims that couldn't be investigated or backed up with evidence. She was soaking wet because it was raining outside. She was messy because she managed to escape, not from the lair of a dark fiend but from the home of an ordinary run-of-the-mill mass murderer. This situation was just like those police shows on TV.

This was all totally normal and not in any way supernatural.

Nothing about moroi.

Nothing about weird relationships with cosmic forces.

And absolutely nothing about cannibalism.

The police were frantic, trying to find all these adults and children, the latest being eight-year-old Mihail Popescu. Even the Bucharest police had come out. And apparently, since several children were from other countries, Interpol was getting involved. Parents were starting to keep their kids inside after dark, news reporters talked at length about the mysterious killer, and here was a little girl stating firmly and quite rationally who the killer was, testifying about her brutal encounter with him, all backed up with a finger.

The cop believed her.

Căpitan Anton Văduva had been a captain for about twenty years. He had seen quite a bit as a captain, from a man who murdered his whole family before killing himself to a sixteen-year-old serial rapist.

Nothing could have prepared him for Evan Caspari.

The report by the little girl would have probably been dismissed if she hadn't been so matter-of-fact and if she hadn't produced a severed finger. A finger severed with a chef's knife. And a child whose clothing had blood on it from several different people, but diluted, as if she had tracked through it long after the blood had been spilt.

The little dugout house was soon surrounded. They had been able to get in place quickly because the assault team was already standing by in the area where most of the children had gone missing. Initially, Anton had little faith in the girl's tip, but the second lieutenant serving desk duty had insisted, and they did have a severed finger. Anton figured it would be a good training exercise.

Anton had thought bringing two dozen heavily armed men was overkill.

He was wrong.

Oh, so wrong.

Upon entering the garden and smelling the pungent stench of blood, Anton had made the right call to go on the offensive. Something about the land didn't sit right with him. He just knew this wasn't animal blood.

They entered the dugout and were met with strong resistance. Caspari had a Russian AK-47 and had heard them entering and took up a vantage point in a blind spot in the cellar, killing two of the officers who entered. This led to a war of attrition as Caspari managed to bunker down and seemed strangely immune to the tear gas they threw to flush him out. He was somehow able to flank both entrances to the basement from that one spot. He also threw a grenade up the stairs, which killed a few more officers and caused them to fall back.

The Gendarmerie was already involved due to the large number of people going missing. Still, with word of the kinds of weapons Caspari had at his disposal, the Ministry of Internal Affairs authorized corresponding force. Anton got dozens of officers as backup, plus much heavier weaponry.

However, even when Caspari eventually ran out of ammo, he managed to kill several more officers armed only with a freaking sword. He lived only because of orders not to kill the Bucharest Ghost. Some wealthy Germans living in south Romania had their children kidnapped and wanted to know where they were.

Had Anton not been under strict orders, he would have filled that man with lead if only for the safety of his men. They restrained him, and he managed to bite the finger off of one of his officers. And the monster swallowed it. Lieutenant Aurel Vasilescu, always a bit of a hothead, had kicked him hard enough he had to have broken some ribs (but a later medical exam had revealed that nothing was broken).

Caspari had laughed.

That laugh Anton would be hearing in his nightmares for years. It was not the laugh of a man who had been caught, a man who would be locked up (but only because they hadn't caught him years earlier when the death penalty was still around) for the rest of his life.

It was the laugh of a man who feared nothing and did not care that they caught him—a laugh of supreme confidence and arrogance that told him that Evan Caspari felt superior to them all.

Caspari was dragged away from the house so they could finally see if anyone was alive in it.

To Anton's regret, they were too late to save Horațiu Vasile. The man had his left leg severed off while he was still alive. His sightless eyes had been staring at the freezer, and Anton realized he must have known the little girl was there.

Vasile's hand still held a knife that he must have used to try to attack Caspari. However, the man was oddly ineffective with his knife. Caspari had been covered in blood, and his clothing was torn, but there was not a mark on him. Somehow, the wily monster walked away from all this with not even a paper cut. If Anton had less integrity, he'd have resolved that discrepancy quite handily.

Vasile had an old army knife that the little girl got from a friend and had given to him as she left. Clever girl—she knew there was no way she'd be able to save him, so she tried to arm him instead. Had she stayed, they would never have found out what Caspari was doing in this basement and who knows how many more would have died.

According to the officer who interviewed her, the child felt incredibly guilty. Little Felicia Petran thought she should have done more to protect the man, but there was nothing a 30 kg girl could do against a very aggressive, full-grown man.

He couldn't imagine being a child and witnessing this.

Eugen Radu, the medical examiner, swore.

"What," Anton demanded.

"That—that thing," Radu grimaced. "He ate part of Vasile while he was killing him."

"Căpitan."

Anton turned from the gruesome sight of Vasile to see an officer pull the final body from the freezer.

It was little Mihail.

Or at least his head.

Laura Bălan, one of his junior officers, was striving hard to be stoic as she pulled the little head out, but the trembling in her arms was not because of the cold.

Anton knew he would see evil if he became a cop, but…this was beyond the pale. Beyond belief.

"O God of spirits and of all flesh, Anton found himself praying for little Mihail's soul. "Give rest to the souls of Thy departed servants in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness, sighing, and sorrow have fled away."

There was silence in the dirty basement. The medical examiner cataloging the body parts focused strictly on writing observations in his notebook. Usually, Radu couldn't shut up. Radu was sorting through the parts, clearly trying to figure out how many bodies were in this freezer.

"Căpitan," Lieutenant Nelu Lungu cried down to them. "We found eight more bodies in the garden."

Eight more bodies…

"You know what the children in the neighbourhood were saying," Bălan said, looking up from placing the little head in another of the numerous body piles in the basement.

"What," Anton said hoarsely.

"That Caspari was a moroi."

Anton looked at the blood-drenched room, the piles of body parts, and how Caspari oddly avoided injury. Then he remembered the look in Caspari's eyes, that dark alien look of blackhearted evil.

"Perhaps," Anton said quietly. "Perhaps."