"Are you okay, son?" Stanley asked him.

The boy didn't answer.

Stanley didn't recognize the youngster, but there were a lot of new families around these days. He no longer knew every child in the neighborhood.

"Can I help you?" he asked. "Are you lost?"

The boy shook his head slowly. There was something strange about him. Something that suddenly made Stanley feel uneasy. It might have been the effect of the darkness and the shadows… but the boy looked very pale, very thin, very… hungry.

"Are you all right?" Stanley asked again, stepping closer. "Can I —"

Snap!

The sound came from directly overhead, loud and menacing. The boy leaped back quickly, out of the way.

Stanley just had time to glance up and see a huge red shape, which might have been some sort of bat, falling through the branches of the trees, almost faster than his eyes could follow.

And then the red thing was on him. Stanley opened his mouth to scream, but before he could, the monster's hands — claws? — clamped over his mouth. There was a brief struggle, then Stanley was sliding onto the ground, unconscious, unseeing, unknowing.

Above him, the two creatures of the night moved in for the feed.

CHAPTER TWO

"Imagine a man his age wearing a Scout's uniform," Mr. Crepsley snorted as he turned our victim over.

"Were you ever in the Scouts?" I asked.

"They did not have them in my day," he replied.

He patted the man's meaty legs and grunted. "Plenty of blood in this one," he said.

I watched as Mr. Crepsley searched the leg for a vein, then cut it open — a small slice — using one of his fingernails. As soon as blood oozed out, he clamped his mouth around the cut and sucked. He didn't believe in wasting any of the "precious red mercury," as he sometimes called it.