Maybe there'd be two more "confirmed bachelors" like the handsome couple who had lived here during the fifties!

Whoever was within the car needed to hurry inside. Autumn rains had been tentatively falling all night and lightning had begun flaring in a building rhythm. She hoped the men didn't catch the front façade lit by the glow of lightning. With its arches and overhangs and stained glass, the manor could appear... forbidding.

The very Gothic traits she'd admired seemed to drive others away.

The vehicle began to rock from side to side on its wide wheels, and the voices grew louder. Then came a man's bellow. Her lips parted when two large boots kicked through the back window, shattering it, glass spraying out into the gravel.

Someone unseen hauled the booted man back inside, but then a rear door began to bulge outward. Were cars so weak in this age that a man could kick it out of shape? No, no, she'd dutifully read the crash test reports, and they said—

The door shot off its hinges, all the way to the front porch. She gasped as a wild-eyed, crazed man lunged out of the vehicle. He was manacled at his wrists and ankles and covered in blood. He immediately fell into a deep slick of mud, only to be tackled by three men.

One of them was her prospective tenant from last night.

She saw then that they all were covered in blood—because the chained one was spitting it at them as he thrashed.

"No... no!" he yelled, struggling not to enter the house. Could he possibly sense there was more here than could be seen? No one had before.

"Conrad, stop fighting us!" the tenant said through gritted teeth. His accent sounded Russian. "We don't want to hurt you."

But the madman named Conrad didn't let up one bit. "God damn you, Nikolai! What do you want with me?"

"We're going to rid you of this madness, defeat your bloodlust."