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“Right now, Tee-­ko, all I want is a story. We know you were part of the ritual that bound Death to this body. How are you connected to a bunch of supernatural skinheads and what do they want?”

Tykho looks off into space. She doesn’t want to answer the question, so Candy jumps in.

“Why disguise yourself, Sigrun?” says Candy.

“Sure—­you can start with that.”

“Back in the day, a lot of us in the völkisch groups used noms de plume.”

I say, “What does your nom mean?”

“It’s the name of a Valkyrie.”

“So you were a Nazi.”

She shakes her head.

“I never cared about politics. I only cared about the real world that lay behind the veil we call the ordinary world.”

“How did you cheat me? What did you do?” says Vincent.

She looks through him like he’s not there.

“I’m a medium. I was. I lost most of my power when I gave up a mortal life. There were several of us in the groups with the gift back then.”

“What groups?” says Candy.

“The two in which I was involved were the Thule-­Gesellschaft and the Vril Society. There were two main mediums in those days. Myself and Maria. Maria Orsic. We worked with other women who claimed to have the gift. I don’t know if they were telling the truth, but what I do know is that one day I saw Death coming for me. So I did something about it.”

“You went out and found yourself a vampire,” I say.

She pours herself more wine.

“We knew many vampires in Munich. All the occult groups did. When I saw Death’s shadow, I wasn’t ready to go, so it was a simple matter to offer myself to a willing vampir.”

Vincent stands up.

“You unbalanced the universe by what you did. The whole line of life and death was disrupted. Innocent ­people died before their time because of you.”

“I don’t care,” she says. “I just knew that I wasn’t ready to go.”

“Tell us about the groups,” says Candy. “What did Thule and Vril do?”

“They were merely occult study groups. Very esoteric stuff. You wouldn’t be interested.”

“I am if it has to do with the Murphy Ranch ritual,” I say.

“What if I say no?”

“Then I’ll kill you. And you’ll be gone and this little empire you’ve built will fall apart because—­you’re right—­there will be a war. But not between shroud eaters and civilians. The bloodsucker factions will all want to take your place and all the world will have to do is sit back and let you rip each other apart. There won’t be enough left of your kind to knock over a taco stand.”

“You’re more right than you probably know,” she says. “All right—­I joined the Thule-­Gesellschaft in 1919, the Vril Society a year or two later.”

“Tell us about Thule,” says Candy.

“The Thule Society was simply an occult study group, looking into the origins of the Aryan race. The name Thule comes from a region far to the north. The top of the world. The capital of ancient Hyperborea. Many in the society believed that this was the origin of the Aryan ­people.”

Candy types furiously on her phone.