And the circle grew.

“Shit!” squealed the girl in the back of the church. Dozing with the soft music, she had just woken to find a rodent army surging through every door. In an instant, she had scrambled up to stand on the pew, climbing as high as she could above the invading horde... not that she was a timid little kid afraid of mice, but a thousand full-grown sewer rats, their fur matted with urine and feces, were enough to daunt any human.

“What the hell’s going on?” she shouted.

“It’s the fire,” Rogasz replied. “They’ve come to the church seeking sanctuary.”

“Rats? Are you crazy?”

“I expect so.”

“Fine,” the girl said. “You be crazy. I’m getting out of here.”

“You wouldn’t survive,” Rogasz told her, putting a hard edge into his voice. “Can’t you see we’re surrounded by flame?”

He nodded toward the stained-glass images. Firelight raged outside now, blazing fiercely through the windows on both sides of the church. “If you went outside,” Rogasz said, “you’d suffocate from the smoke.”

“So I should stay and burn instead?”

“Have faith,” he told her. He said the words because good people said such things, and because he wanted to win the approval of any deity who might be listening. “Have faith, have faith, have faith. Haaaaaave faith. Haaaaaaaaaave faith.”

The girl died an hour before sunrise. Some of the rats survived, though.

Fires on the horizon brought a false dawn to the city; but the vampire could feel true sunup only minutes away as he approached the Adversary’s bus shelter once more. Rogasz had not escaped the church unscathed — he had played the piano till it burst into flame, its strings snapping one by one with enough tension to drive the broken ends through the burning wood around them. One side of the vampire’s face was baked raw, oozing fluids. He had stopped playing because his right hand no longer worked.