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Shaper, distraught, only weakly fought back as Charon dragged him out of the cemetery, past Victor, and to an abandoned and derelict house.

But Shaper blinked, looking at it, and saw fresh white paint trim on the broken and peeling windows, yellow bright as sunflowers coloring the burnt-out and rotting husk of the building. Again he blinked, and ghosts of two young children, both dark-haired boys, came running in from play as their mother, a comely woman with red hair called them inside. Red hair and dragon green eyes. The boys had green eyes too, he saw, as he got closer, feeling Charon at his back, but no longer seeing him.

And he knew their names, and who they were now.

"Erin... Adam... Jared... why did I go out that day...? Why did I stay too late with the Sheriff at the tavern...? Why did I come home so late...."

Images like flashes of light flickered before the delusional Shaper's eyes.

Erin and the children having dinner, they going out to the barn to milk the cow and feed the rabbits. The vampires, swarming the house and barn, too angry at his absence to not stop with just the farm stock's deaths.

Too angry for Charon to care to stop them.

Dead, dead - Erin, raped and torn apart, Adam, staked, beheaded and burned, Jared, the same and he, standing in the middle of the yard in shock, hot angry tears dripping down his face. Shaper sat back on his heels, keening eerily, as images he didn't want, couldn't be seeing again, flashed before his eyes over and over and over. He fell forward, catching himself on his elbows and screamed in pain.

Charon smiled, this was too good. Shaper had not even hardly gotten inside the fenced in yard before he collapsed onto his knees, whispering about events that were burned into Charon's mind forever, and Shaper was only beginning to remember. Then he was screaming, doubled up in pain, Charon mused, watching Shaper writhing upon the gravel street at his feet. Another smile.

It was sheer pleasure for one to witness it all again, and demented and cruel torment for the other.

It was because of that enjoyment that he didn't hear the soft footstep behind him, or even notice Victor, until the small man had sucker punched him with such force that the faceless vampire was forced back three steps.

"Bastard," was all the dark haired man said. He walked over to Shaper, and forced the rizen to look at his face. When it became obvious that Shaper wasn't seeing him, just staring off into the distance, Victor exhaled cigarette smoke into his face. All of Shaper's muscles relaxed, and he curled up on the gravel and grass, asleep. Victor then looked up at Charon again, who was just starting to recover. The short hunter snuffed out the pale blue cigarette he'd been smoking.

"You are the most evil man I think I've ever met. And believe me I've met some real assholes." He stood the rest of the way. He glared into the mess that had once been a face without flinching. "What is it about people that makes them want to make it someone else's fault that they're a prick?"

Charon hissed, and stepped away from Victor, gesturing to his ruined visage angrily.

"Oh, but this IS his fault! So were the deaths of his wife and children! If he had been home that night, we would have just slain HIM! I just wanted to show him the truth!"

Victor hefted Shaper up onto his shoulder.

"You sir... are a very sick and evil man. And someday soon, I'm going to give you your medicine, one little bullet-full at a time."

Shaper stirred slightly, moaned out a name. Victor hushed him softly, and glared back at Charon.

"I'm taking him home, if you try to stop me, or attempt to harm either myself, Shaper, or Amy... I'll see your ugly piggy face on a pike set on the town gates. Yours, and the rest of your creepy little army's."

Charon simply laughed, and faded into darkness.

Victor took Shaper home, and set him on the couch. The rizen moaned again, and half woke, clawing at the mask on his belt.

Almost as if he was either desperate to get at it, or it was burning into his flesh. Victor couldn't quite tell which.

Somehow, he came to the conclusion, that it was time to wake Shaper up. Whatever was happening talking might help. And it wasn't as if Victor was a stranger to tragedy. He went into the kitchen and collected a small silver bowl and shook some sage from the spice cabinet into it. As odd as it was, sage was the only thing besides time that would counter dream-weed. He had a cigarette that had sage rolled into it, but he saved that for when he couldn't do this.

A moment later the blue-gray smoke drifted over Shaper's face, bringing with it wakefulness, if not awareness. Awareness might have to come much later.

Shaper blinked, and rubbed at dilated eyes, looking mournfully at Victor.

"I know who I am...." Victor nodded softly, not sure what to say yet. "And I don't want to be that man. I want to burn that out of me. I want to forget it all... but I can't. And part of me doesn't want to let go of them."

"Memory," Victor said softly in the silence that followed Shaper's confession, "is the hardest part."

Shaper stared at Victor, then back down at the mask at his waist.

"Do you think... do you think that I'm weak, because I don't want to remember?"

"No." Victor lit a clove, and offered the box to Shaper. "There's lots in my life I don't want to remember either, but I don't have the luxury of being able to forget. The question is really what you're going to do."

Shaper looked back at the mask, then up at Victor.

"I think I want to kill Charon. I'd not be in this mess of pain and regret if he hadn't shown me the house. It just sucked me in, chewed me up, and spit me out, Victor! How the hells can a HOUSE do that to you?" He took a proffered clove and lit it, inhaling deep enough any normal man would have choked by now.

Victor sighed, and exhaled a wreath of spicy smoke.

"It wasn't the house. That was only the catalyst. It was what's left in you that's still Merrill calling for something. But only you know what that is, and only you can come to terms with it. Best I can do for you is offer an ear that'll listen to you, and whatever advice I can offer. Better than I had. But right now, killing Charon sounds like a good idea." He scratched under his chin thoughtfully. "So much for my time off. I should really know better." He leaned forward earnestly. "If you're feeling up to it, then we should probably start on this new project right away - if we can get it done before the town's celebration starts."

There was a loud crash of thunder followed by a drowning torrent outside the window. Both of the dark haired men paused to look at it for a few minutes. Victor got up with a clove between his lips and dug out a fluffy pink robe, draping it over the end table next to the newly-replaced front door.

"As I was saying, we should get it done before the celebration, because if I read my psychos right Charon is just the kind to make a big mess there just to bother the fuck out of you."

Shaper nodded.

"And after this, I think I'm going to wall all that stuff up until I'm ready to see it again. Merrill is dead, and I am not." He sighed, and finished his clove, stumping it out in the ashtray on the coffee table.

Amy padded in later, she was wearing a pastel cotton summer dress with violets printed all over it. While Victor and Shaper were going over a city map, she wriggled out of her wet dress, and into the robe without either one of them noticing she'd come in.

That was, until she plopped herself down in Victor's lap with a smile, wrapping her arms about his neck and giving him a kiss for being so thoughtful for her needs.

Shaper smiled at her, then sighed, looking at the map.

"Well, the house was here, the cemetery here, and Charon's place here. Notice the pattern?" Shaper said, looking up at Victor from the triangle the points made. "And these are the places where the vampires attacked specific townsfolk." More triangles, linked and forming not a pentacle, but a pentagram. With a circle about it and the town square where the celebration was to be held was at the middle of it.

Shaper blinked again, and gasped.

"Shit. Shitshitshit. He's doing it again... re-enacting Merrill and the Foxhunters' deaths. Only."

Victor finished for him.

"The bastard's using the entire town as proxy for his family. I wonder what you did in life that pissed him off this much, Shaper?"

The rizen glared at Victor.

"I didn't piss him off. But I think I know what did," he whispered, and fingered his mask slightly, rubbing off a bit of dried blood from the bloodbath the night before. "And we're going to fix this mess. We can't let him hurt anyone else because of me. If he did, I think I'd go mad... and then you'd have to kill me. And I'd rather keep my sanity, and life."

"Then we're going to want to keep an eye out across these lines," Victor said, tracing them on the map. He got a shiver down his spine as he did.

"Hmmm?" asked Amy, curiously.

"Stay in tonight Amy," he said softly. "I just got the worst bad feeling I've ever had in my life." He exhaled slowly, and rubbed his hands up and down over his shirt sleeves. "Anyway, I plan on killing every godamn Vampire I come across tonight unless they give me a damn good reason, and if my blood's up, I might not see you as you."

Amy looked shocked. Victor gave her a kiss, then got up and grabbed his coat, shrugging into it.

Shaper nodded, and stood.

"Alright, but YOU get to take care of any of them in THAT area. I'm not going near that house again." With that, he slipped on his mask, and they went out to cause a certain nasty master vampire a world of hurt.

Victor nodded thoughtfully. "I shouldn't worry. We don't need to think about that direct area - or any of the other points - it's the lines that concern us now. Something big is going to happen. I can feel it."

By midnight, both of them were soaked through and hadn't seen anything that backed up Victor's feelings of discord.

Then they turned a corner and Shaper hissed, then snatched up the wet red rose and the soggy card tied to it.

This was getting unnerving... how did that ugly faceless goon know where they were?

Instead of a real message, there were song lyrics written and smeared by rain on this card.

Victor read from looking around Shaper's elbow.

"It's only forever... that's not long at all... the lost and the lonely. That's...?' The last word's smeared up too much to read. But I know what Charon wants. C'mon Shaper, we're going 'underground.'"

Shaper blinked and sighed.

"You KNOW how much I hate sewer crawling!"

"And I like it any more?" he demanded. "If you want, I'll go on my own, and you can find Detective Hillman and tell him that we think Charon's going to attack again." Despite the lack of proof the discordant hum down his spine hadn't lessened, it had gotten worse. And the buzz wasn't a vampire feeling, or a uncontrolled werebeast feeling, it was deeper darker - and smelled of the copper-musk of ancient blood.

Shaper sighed, and put on his mask again. The coppery-musky smell increased. It was the same as whatever was part of Shaper's mask.

Victor put two and two together.

"Shit. If I'm right..."

"And boy are you ALWAYS right," quipped Shaper.

"Shut up..." he growled. "Anyway, if I'm right then Charon's going to try and re-summon whatever's bound to you the day of the celebration and let it lose on the town."

Shaper laughed.

"He can't. It's bound to something else now. It can't be re-summoned. It's too much a part of me. Unless... he's going to summon and puppeteer me?" Victor nodded.

"I think that was what he had in mind. I think that's why he set a trap for us. Isn't that right, you faceless freak?"

Shaper spun about and hissed again.

Charon stood there with his remaining minions, and smiled.

It was not a pretty sight. Victor moved up behind the rizen and drew his gun.

Shaper's fingers elongated into claws, and his hair, already a spiky mess, bristled like a cat's.

Charon seemed more surprised to see Shaper, than the other way around.

"I expected you to be back at your apartment cowering and crying like a baby."

Shaper snarled.

"Yeah, well I'm not a human that can just be manipulated. Or a demon you can summon twice after a binding. It's not going to work, Charon. You aren't human... and you can't accomplish what I did the first time around. The summoner has to be mortal!"

Charon laughed, and they pulled forward a frail and sickly-looking woman. She was so very old, and Shaper blinked, nearly falling over from the shock.

"Oh god... why didn't I remember her...?" Victor stared at Shaper.

Charon smiled, and explained to the supernatural investigator.

"Victor Shelly, meet Heather Foxhunter. Shaper's youngest daughter and my personal demon summoner."

Victor shook his head and snorted. "Sorry. I ain't even renting that one." He lit a clove, and paced up and down in front of Charon, as if oblivious to the danger he was in. "For starters, she's too old. Second," he paused and leaned in close. Then licked his lips. "Scent's wrong."

"What the hell are you?" demanded Charon confused. "'Scent's wrong,' what kind of cryptic garbage is that?"

"Just that. If this woman is Merrill Foxhunter's youngest, she should smell sort of like him. And since Shaper's only been wandering around for the past five years, and bodies only keep so long after gruesome painful deaths," he shrugged. "Just doesn't add up."

Shaper was in tears again, black oily things that oozed down the cheeks of his mask.

"Too.... old?" A nod. A growl. Then something that wasn't quite Shaper snapped and he leapt at the woman, toothy maw wide, claws extended, and about 200 pounds to back up his incoming blow.

"Not Heather! DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!"

"Well someone's a little bit irritable today," Victor said, turning back to Charon, only to find the vampire gone. One young vampire stood blinking owlishly at Victor, but the rest had fled.

"Well?" he asked her. "Do you have something to say, or should I kill you? You really should re-think your choice of employers."

She blinked again, and stared at what Shaper had left of the elderly demon-summoner. Then she stared at Shaper, who was splattered in blood, and seemed too enraged currently to notice the six-inch piece of silver rammed into his shoulder. Then, with a small yelp, she ran, though not the way the others had.

Smart thinking on her part to get out while she could.