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ways down the corridor was the door to a workout room.
    The door was locked.
    The Baron slipped his forefinger between the door and the jamb. A similarly long and slender claw was attached to the unusually pale and slender digit. He slid it up the jamb to the lock. The door opened easily. The two went inside.
    The room was a dojo—kenpo karate—approximately thirty feet by thirty feet with a hardwood floor. Punching bags and weight machines in the back.
    The two stopped and faced each other in the middle of the room, like an adult encountering a child. Or a big man encountering a dwarf. Facing this great wall of muscle and bone, the Baron didn’t twitch an eyebrow.
    “There’s something way fucked up about you,” he said.
    A slight smile colored Siegfried’s otherwise rugged and expressionless face, as ineffably merry as it was ineffably evil.
    “You figured it out, eh?” a cheerful, youthful voice said. “There’s no pulling the wool over your eyes.”
    “Of course—” The Baron’s eyes flashed red. “Come out, come out, whoever you are.”
    “Just a sec.”
    Siegfried rolled up his shirt to his neck and plunged his hands into his abdomen. Even as his hands sank down to his wrists, the Baron evinced not the slightest reaction.

    Not even when the front of his body unzipped in a line from his belly button to his Adam’s apple—but unaccompanied by the sound of tearing flesh. It had been severed from the start.
    The giant ripped open his own belly with his own hands. And from the wound appeared—
    A man clad in black, stained with blood and fat, casting off a bad odor and bearing Gento Roran’s countenance, his comeliness not dimmed in the least. Far from it. An orchid in all its sublime brilliance had just emerged from a fetid swamp.
    If it was true that the gods made man, then this young man, secreting himself inside the giant and controlling his every move, should be a god.
    “So, how did you see through the facade?” he asked, raking back the bangs clinging to his forehead.
    “Well, if I had to pin it on any one thing, the bench bent a bit more than before. You weigh more than his guts.”
    “I’m impressed. But such insights may cost you your life.”
    Gento flashed an eerie smile. It possessed the kind of demonic air that would have made any other man as tense as a tightly coiled spring. But the Baron only grew more intrigued.
    “When did you take him out?” he asked, as if asking about a curious turn in the weather.
    “In the bathroom. It was simpler than I imagined. Left the viscera in the garbage with a generous seasoning of disinfectant. It should take another two or three days to get ripe enough to notice.”
    “Those are some impressive skills you have,” the Baron said, fixing his gaze on Gento.
    Gento swayed back. “Nice trick you got there, too. You some sort of vampire?”
    “There are those who call me that. I have been wanting to quench my thirst ever since I saw that laceration on your cheek. Come into my arms—”
    The Baron’s cat-like eyes doubled as hypnotic weapons. They shone now all the brighter. When Gento’s entranced pupils glowed with the same crimson light, the Baron glided up to him. His clawed right hand rose to the level of Gento’s neck and slashed sideways.
    A red line rose up on the skin and grew wider. The Baron fastened his red lips to Gento’s throat.
    Gento sank down, a movement so quick and abrupt that the Baron didn’t have time to retreat. His startled face recorded the sharp blow to his abdomen. His unbelieving eyes focused on the object sticking straight through the center of his stomach.
    “I hear vampires don’t do so well with wooden stakes,” Gento said with a complacent smile. “Considering how this might turn out, I happened to have the ideal item on hand. I’ll say a prayer for what’s left of your soul afterwards.”
    Gento yanked out the stake. The Baron crumpled without a sound and fell to the floor. The one-foot