one

I was catching intuition from Syl, or something else, but somehow I just knew my house wasn't empty. The last time this had happened had been when Carmichael's thugs had grabbed me. Since then I'd added a few tricks, however. After making sure no one was in immediate view, I nudged the wood above the doorway in just the right way, and a small liquid-crystal screen popped into view, cycling views of the various rooms from a CryWolf-fitted set of lowlight cameras, with a running status of the systems showing me what was going on, or not, in each room.
Nothing showed up in any view. Were I in an ordinary line of work, that would've been enough to satisfy my paranoia, but vampires didn't show on videotape, film, or anything else; while they had to be invited in, it wouldn't be hard to have an accomplice do that for them and then have the accomplice leave. That's why I studied the status carefully. The motion detectors were a bit different; they didn't actually try to produce images—and thus shouldn't be covered by the magical prohibition against mechanical devices "seeing" a vampire—but just detected air movement within a given volume. None of the detectors showed anything out of the ordinary since I'd closed up shop, so I shrugged. I was getting jumpy.
So I think I could be excused for jumping backwards with a shout of "what the fuck!?" when I entered my living room to find a man sitting in one of the chairs, waiting for me.
"Sit down, Mr. Wood." he said. He was older than me—forty-five to fifty, I'd guess, with a tanned, lined complexion. His