“I could think of a hundred counterexamples...” Rogasz began.

“Then I’ll see you back here a hundred more times.” The Adversary disappeared in a puff of smoke that smelled of burned rat hair and the screams of children.

Dawn came. The dark day of the soul. Rogasz greeted it.

In the first hour, there were still too many cinders in the air to admit more than a ghost of sun. The vampire felt his hair smolder, but that was all.

In the second hour, people began to come out of hiding. Some wept; some had faces of stone. One man walked through the ruins of a tenement, calling for his dog. Rogasz helped him shout, “Skeeters! Skeeters! Skeeters!” The vampire knew there was no life left under the debris, but he liked having something he could yell over and over, hearing his voice echo off the scorched masonry.

By the third hour, the ash was finally settling out of the air. Fires still burned in some neighborhoods, but a day fire is a sheepish thing compared to a night one. As the haze cleared, the sun broke through. Rogasz spent a few minutes dodging it, then gave up. The good side of his face burned to match the other, but it was a dry burn, like a piece of leather curing in the desert.

Sometime in the fourth hour, a beagle came in response to the vampire’s calls. By that time, the man looking for Skeeters had gone away, so Rogasz had no idea whether this was the right dog. “Skeeters, Skeeters, Skeeters,” Rogasz said, and the dog wagged its tail.

For much of the fifth hour, the vampire lay on a stone bench in front of a law office. A sign on the office door read CLOSED WHILE EMERGENCY CONTINUES. No emergency was visible. The dog lay on the ground beside the bench, sleeping in the sun. Rogasz didn’t sleep, but he closed his eyes, feeling daylight sear into him like a welding torch. “I am being purified,” he told the dog. “This is what redemption feels like.”

In the sixth hour, a policeman yelled at him, “You can’t sleep there, fella.” But when the officer got closer, he said, “Holy shit! Just stay put, don’t try to get up. I’ll call an ambulance.” No ambulance ever came — not in this city, on this day — and at some point the policeman left, too.