It won’t work, not in here, Jake thought, but even before the idea had been completely articulated in his mind, he understood it was working. He knew by the smell of them. The aggressiveness went out of it. And the few who had begun to rise from their tables-the red holes in the foreheads of the low people gaping, the blue auras of the vampires seeming to pull in and intensify-sat back down again, and hard, as if they had suddenly lost command of their muscles.

“Get them, those are the ones Sayre…” Then Tweety stopped talking. His left hand-if you could call such an ugly talon a hand-touched the butt of his high-tech gun and then fell away.

The brilliance seemed to leave his eyes. “They’re the ones Sayre… S-S-Sayre… “Another pause. Then the bird-thing said, “Oh sai, what is the lovely thing that you hold?”

“You know what it is,” Callahan said. Jake was moving and Callahan, mindful of what the boy gunslinger had told him outside-

Make sure that every time I look on my right, I see your face-stepped back down from the table to move with him, still holding the turtle high. He could almost taste the room’s silence, but-

But there was another room. Rough laughter and hoarse, carousing yells-a party from the sound of it, and close by. On the left. From behind the tapestry showing the knights and their ladies at dinner. Something going on back there, Callahan thought, and probably not Elks’ Poker Night.

He heard Oy breathing fast and low through his perpetual grin, a perfect little engine. And something else. A harsh raiding sound with a low and rapid clicking beneath. The combination set Callahan’s teeth on edge and made his skin feel cold. Something was hiding under the tables.

Oy saw the advancing insects first and froze like a dog on point, one paw raised and his snout thrust forward. For a moment the only part of him to move was the dark and velvety skin of his muzzle, first twitching back to reveal the clenched needles of his teeth, then relaxing to hide them, then twitching back again.