When the Bellerophon touched down in Vienna, the group was taken by limousine to the private hotel suite of Dr. Reiner Verletz. Verletz, hosting the Gershwin brothers, had arranged for George to conduct a program of his classical work for a special radio broadcast. Also in attendance was Simeon Schrek, an old hunting colleague of Lord Merryweather who had been horribly disfigured by the Great White Tiger, and who was currently serving as Verletz's bodyguard.
Later that evening, Cara discovered that the music charts Gershwin was working on had been altered in some strange way. Dr. Brauner was discovered murdered, a half-finished message written in his blood - a message that seemed to implicate Benedict as the murderer! Max and Juliet discovered a young girl making off with the music charts, and captured her.
The local constabulary arrived, bringing with them a Nazi storm trooper, Major Wolfram Steinholtz. Claiming that Brauner's status as an officer of the German navy rendered this a matter for the German government, Steinholtz arrested Benedict, who protested his innocence. As Benedict was taken away, Dr. Verletz revealed to the heroes that he was a spy working against the Nazis. With the help of a gypsy band, Verletz transmitted information using a code based on musical time signatures - thus the inconsistencies in Gershwin's charts. The little girl caught by Juliet and Max was the daughter of the gypsy king Rostov Dracul, and Cara, Juliet and Lord Merryweather set off to return her to the gypsy camp while Max kept watch over Schrek from a second story ledge.
Dracul was happy see his daughter again and agreed to answer some questions. The heroes asked for Dracul's help in rescuing Benedict from the Nazis. Meanwhile, at the hotel, Max saw a compliment of German soldiers approaching and leapt to the ground, commandeering a motorcycle and speeding to the camp to warn the others just as the first armored transport entered the field . . .
Episode Seven: Long Trip on a Short Train
The Nazi storm troopers brought pandemonium upon Dracul's camp as they made their entrance. Juliet and Max sped away on the motorcycle as Lord Merryweather and Cara set off for the train station to catch Steinholtz and Benedict. Cara charmed the station master into telling her that people matching the description of Steinholtz's party were on a train headed to Berlin. The couple were accompanied by Dracul, incognito, making good on his promise to help them rescue Benedict.
The trio boarded the train only to discover that Benedict was being held prisoner by armed soldiers in a private car in the front of the train. As the three tried to find a way inside, the train stopped at the Austria-Czech border, and more soldiers boarded, accompanying a rotund, balding Italian man in a cape and Cara's former guardian, Wilhelm Lipschutz. Dracul picked the pocket of the Italian, revealing him to be Professor Benito Ozymandius, occultist and advisor to Benito Mussolini.
Sir Heathcliffe, Cara and Wilhelm staged a daring raid on the private car. As Sir Heathcliffe and Ozymandius engaged each other in a death-defying duel on the roof of the train, Cara, still inside the train, thought she saw Ozymandius preparing to murder Wilhelm. Unbeknownst to Cara, her vision was but an illusion cast by Ozymandius, and as she lurched forward to save Wilhelm, she lunged for an open door in the train car, just as the train was passing over a bridge connecting the ends of a gaping chasm! Sir Heathcliffe reached for her and missed, as Cara toppled forward toward a rocky death below . . .
Episode Eight: Black Tie Sacrifice
An unfurling whip wrapped itself around Cara's wrist, pulling her back into the train car. Dracul had arrived, but Cara, still under Ozymandius' spell, tried to cut herself loose. Lord Merryweather intervened and the two men snapped Cara out of her trance.
Elsewhere, Max and Juliet overheard Major Steinholtz ordering the Nazis to withdraw because "the Professor has what he needs." The two returned to the Bellerophon, where Sammy, acting secretly under the thrall of Wo-Feng, urged them to Prague under the pretense that Lord Merryweather requested they meet him there.
Later, on the train, Benedict discovered from Major Steinholtz that he was in Vienna to snatch a member of Dracul's gypsy band for Ozymandius and take her with them to Prague. The group postulated that Professor Ozymandius was still on board the train and, leaving Benedict to watch the Major, searched for the villain. On board, they encountered Lamont Cranston, secretly, the infamous Shadow, the mentalist vigilante with the uncanny ability to "cloud men's minds," who was on his way to Prague with his fiancée for a "vacation." Cara experienced a vision of a bizarre ballroom where the angles did not make sense, a place she knew only as "The Hotel Negral."
Once the heroes were reunited in Prague, Cara overheard talk on the street of some horrible murders in the Jewish Quarter and set off to find Cranston. As Max distracted Cranston's fiancée, Margot Lane, Cara discovered from Cranston that Prague was the meeting place of the Black Lodge, a cabal of powerful sorcerers called erlkonigs, who ruled the supernatural world and who met every seven years to decide the fate of the earth. Cranston revealed that he was on his way to the Lodge to liberate a friend and warned Cara to stay away from the place - a warning she promptly ignored. As Cara rejoined the other members of the Empire Club, the group searched for the Hotel Negral in the Jewish Quarter. Benedict gave Juliet an ornate silver crucifix, an item passed down to Grey women for generations for protection from evil forces. Although Juliet took the gift, she made clear her intentions to give it back when the danger had passed.
During the search, a pack of creatures, looking much like humanoid hellhounds, cornered the party in some dark back-streets. As the heroes fought off the beasts, an unseen figure pulled Cara inside a nearby building. As her eyes focused, they fell upon the form of Wo-Feng . . .
Episode Nine: The Black Lodge - Dues Paid
Having noticed Cara's absence, Lord Merryweather set off to find her, only to be confronted by a pair of mesmerized shills of Wo-Feng, who escaped in the confusion. Benedict and Max defeated the hellhound man-beasts, but not without being horribly mauled in the process. Similarly, Lord Merryweather quickly subdued Wo-Feng's shills, one of whom turned out to be the Central Park cabby that aided the heroes in their high-speed pursuit of Orthos-Ra's servitor on New Year's Eve. As it happened, this was the "friend" Cranston had come to find, his trusted chauffeur. The heroes sent the man to retrieve Cranston in the hopes that the Shadow would help them find Wilhelm, currently in the company of the nefarious Black Lodge.
Once they found the Hotel Negral, the group entered to find an unholy union of five mystics, including Wo-Feng and Ozymandius. Among the others was a robe-clad man with a staff who called himself Manos, a blue-hooded figure known as "The Blue Reaper," and a wizened wizard with a glass jar containing a hatchling of the fearful arachnoid of Terminus Island. Cara recognized the old wizard as Rostov Dracul's ancestor, Vlad Tepes, King of the Vampires. Wilhelm and Schrek were present as well, attending to Professor Ozymandius.
As Juliet and Tepes struggled for the jar, the Lodge confronted the Empire Club, rendering the heroes' victory unlikely. Even the timely appearance of the Shadow through the skylight did little to extradite the heroes from this sticky situation. With no options left, Cara bargained with Wo-Feng, and promised to accompany him to his palace in exchange for the lives of her friends. As a gesture of good faith, Wo-Feng killed Simeon Schrek with a wave of his sinewy hand.
Similarly, as Tepes was about to deliver a killing blow to the heavily wounded Max, Juliet bargained for his life, agreeing to become the vampire's latest bride. The party descended upon Tepes and, as Benedict plunged a wooden stake into the vampire's heart, Tepes declared a blood hunt on Juliet by all of his subjects and mortal descendants for her betrayal. In an instant, the vampire decayed into dust.
As the police arrived, Sir Heathcliffe and Juliet noticed that Cara and Wo-Feng were gone and nowhere to be found within the Hotel Negral. One of the police officers, while searching the hotel, did find Tepes' signet ring, and palmed it surreptitiously . . .
Episode Ten: Dead Hearts
Two days later, as Benedict and Max were convalescing in the hospital, a police officer asked Sir Heathcliffe to identify the body of Simeon Schrek. Sir Heathcliffe and Wilhelm accompanied the officer to the medical examiner's office only to find the body missing! Closer inspection revealed a strange, sweet-smelling residue and the peculiar telltale scratches of a beastly claw. From one of the detectives, Sir Heathcliffe and Wilhelm learned that Schrek's was not the first body to disappear from the morgue that night - the corpses of an elderly man and a prostitute were also missing. Believing there might be a connection between these events and the disappearance of Cara, Sir Heathcliffe and Wilhelm set off once again for the Hotel Negral.
As Juliet waited for word from the staff of a nearby hospital regarding Max's and Benedict's conditions, Alistair Smith-Smythe arrived, bringing news from King Fuad that he wanted his son returned to Egypt immediately. At the Hotel Negral, Lord Merryweather and Wilhelm discovered that the man-eating arachnoid hatchling was growing with alarming celerity. They stumbled upon a macabre workshop in the hotel where a horrible, rotting zombie attacked them. The zombie left behind the same unguent as that found in the medical examiner's office, and his face had been altered to look like Sir Heathcliffe! Wilhelm suspected that someone was planning to replace each member of the party with zombie duplicates, and feared that Juliet may be the next in danger. The two rushed to the airfield to intercept the Bellerophon, only to find the craft lifting off into the Great Blue Yonder. Surprisingly, a confused Juliet emerged from the trees, upset that she was left behind by Sammy.
The three returned to the hospital to visit Max and Benedict, who, much to their mutual dismay, were sharing a room. On the way to the hospital room of the two Americans, the trio saw police detectives hauling away the dead form of a beast man, the multiple scalpels protruding from its hairy hide clearly attributable to Benedict's expert knife-throwing skills known as "Sunanju." Juliet continued to the hospital room and made an inordinate fuss over Max, as Sir Heathcliffe and Wilhelm investigated the incident of the beast man. They learned that the beast man was killed while attempting to steal the corpse of an Algerian woman - one of Cara's approximate size and build!
Returning to the hospital room, Wilhelm and Sir Heathcliffe arrived to find Juliet still fawning over Max, driving Benedict mad with jealousy. Benedict noticed that the cross he had given to Juliet was no longer around her neck. Suspicious of Juliet's behavior, Wilhelm moved close to her to smell her perfume. The familiar odor of the zombies' mysterious unguent emanated from her person. Diverting Juliet's attention momentarily, Wilhelm informed the others of his discovery. Benedict told of an offshoot of India's ancient Thuggee cult that he had encountered in his travels, who used a similar unguent to allow the truly evil to avoid the wheel of reincarnation and remain on earth forever. The group agreed to take action, and Wilhelm escorted the zombie Juliet back to the hotel. Before they left, however, the faux Juliet kissed Benedict on the lips, conferring a strange, mind-altering poison to him, and told Benedict secretly that Max had torn the cross from her neck in a fit of jealously and refused to return it to her.
Moments after Wilhelm and the zombie Juliet left for the hotel, the power in the hospital went out. Ordering the two Americans to remain in their beds, Lord Merryweather left the room to investigate. Out in the hall, Sir Heathcliffe encountered a zombified Simeon Schrek, leading a pack of decaying zombie hounds. Lord Merryweather fired his pistol as the cadaverous canines descended upon him, alerting Max with the gunshot. Rising from his bed, Max moved to leave, but Benedict, still in the thrall of the zombie Juliet, blocked his egress, enraged at Max's alleged theft of his family heirloom from Juliet, the Cross of Santa Anna! Benedict rushed forward, grappling Max, and the two crashed through the hospital window onto the front lawn, struggling on the rain-soaked grounds in front of the hospital in the dark of night . . .