The discharge etched a jagged line across my vision, and the smell of ozone filled the room. The sound was nowhere near as loud as natural thunder, but it was enough to make my ears ring. The blast shattered the window, leaving blobs of melted glass around the edges of the frame. A single insect glowed orange in the molten glass. I peered outside and spotted two men on the patio below. No, not men.
I jerked back as more wasps flew toward us. I fired again, but this time what emerged was little more than a spark of static electricity. “Oh, come on,” I shouted. This gun was supposed to have enough ammo for more than a hundred shots.
The insects buzzed through the window and converged on Nicholas. He ripped two away even as more began to burrow into his chest. He crushed one between his fingers and tried to dig out the next, but he wasn’t fast enough.
He spasmed as if he was the one who had been hit by lightning. His eyes bulged, and then his features eased into a smile. “Exquisite,” he whispered. He took a single step and exploded into dust.
One of the wasps flew up from the ground, trailing dust like tiny contrails. Deb’s hand shot out, trapping the insect between thumb and forefinger. She had it halfway to her mouth before she stopped and seemed to realize what she was doing. She caught me staring and shrugged. “Instincts.”
“Yeah.”
She made a face, popped the bug into her mouth, and chomped. Blood dribbled from her lip, but she kept chewing, and soon spat out bits of broken metal.
Lena stomped the other two, grinding them into the carpet with a vicious twist of her heel. Behind her, Nidhi was carefully lifting the girl in her arms.
The vamp with the glasses, Rook, scaled the wall like a spider, rifle in one hand as he peeked out the upper corner of the window. “I’m heading for the roof to get a better look—”
He squawked in surprise as he lost his grip and fell, landing hard on a LEGO castle and a green pony.
At the same time, the girl Nidhi was holding squirmed and mumbled, “Don’t wanna get up.”
“Focus, Sarah,” Deb snapped. “Keep them under.”
The vampire stared at the girl. “I’m trying,” she said. “It’s not working.”
Lena grabbed Nidhi, dragged her and the girl into the hall, and shoved them in the closet. “Stay there,” Lena said, shutting the door.
I heard the girl screaming, “No! Stranger! Let go of me!” as Nidhi tried to calm her.
Rook remained behind to watch the window while the rest of us made our way downstairs. Deb and Sarah simply vaulted over the railing, landing silently on the carpet below. “We’ve got more out front,” Sarah called.
In the family room, the three-legged Lab had woken up and started barking. From the kitchen, a woman— presumably the mother—called, “Estrella?”
The baby was crying, too, and I saw the father stirring. I reduced the setting on my shock-gun. Maybe it just needed time to recharge? I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it on the family. Or their dog.
The father jumped to his feet, then froze. He raised his hands and stepped back, round eyes locked on my gun. “Estrella!”
“Daddy!”
“Estrella is safe.” I kept the shock-gun pointed at the floor as I hurried down the steps.
“Who are you people?” he demanded in Spanish. “What did you do to my daughter?” The three-legged black Lab was doing his best to add to the chaos, barking and jumping and trying to bite Smudge, which put him in the same intellectual league as Nidhi’s cat.
Jeff stepped past me and snarled. The Lab immediately backed away, tail tucked so far between his legs that when he started peeing on the floor, he managed to soak his tail in the process.
“Was that really necessary?” I asked. To the father, I said, “Esta a salvo. She’s safe.”
He paled. “Please don’t hurt them.”
Something slammed through the front door hard enough to send splinters of wood flying into the house. Sarah and Lena caught whatever it was by the arms and hurled it right back out, but a second attacker raced through on all fours and knocked Sarah to the ground. A group of metal insects flew at Lena’s face, driving her back.
“Con permiso, Senor Sanchez.” I shoved the father toward the stairs, ducked behind the couch, and swore. Every once in a while, I really hated being right.
The man standing over Sarah was naked from the waist up. A fine layer of white fur covered his skin, and an Ace bandage was wrapped around his upper arm. His lips were blue, and his fingers were blackened from frostbite. Sarah had jabbed one of her stakes into his thighs, but it wasn’t slowing him down.
This time when I pulled the trigger, the shock-gun did exactly what it was supposed to. Electricity cracked through the air, enough to put an ordinary human out for a good twenty-four hours. The partially-transformed wendigo roared in pain, then jumped away before I could fire again. I had blackened the fur on his chest and pissed him off, but that was all.
From the staircase, Mister Sanchez whispered, “Who are you people?”
Before I could come up with an even halfway convincing lie, Deb emerged from the kitchen cradling the baby in one arm and dragging the woman by the wrist. “Isaac, would you mind?”
The mother had a paring knife, and was stabbing it into Deb’s back. I caught her arm, holding her long enough for Deb to grab the knife and snap the blade with one hand. After that demonstration, they allowed Deb to lead them upstairs.
“What’s happening?” the woman demanded, her voice weak. “My daughter—”
“Nidhi, move them all into the bathroom and lock the damn door,” Deb shouted. When she returned, she was clutching her shoulder. Her blood flowed more slowly than it would have in a human, but those cuts had to hurt. “Sarah, whoever’s out there, put them down
“You think I haven’t been trying?” Sarah shot back.
My phone buzzed, startling me and setting Smudge off like a tiny hydrogen bomb. The screen said “Unknown Caller.”
The insects fell back to the doorway. Sarah and Lena kept an eye on the door while Deb, Jeff, and I watched the front window. Keeping my gun ready, I brought the phone to my ear. Harrison had hacked my computer and the Porter network. Why wouldn’t he have my cell phone number, too? “Hello, August.”
“You want to tell me what the hell you’re doing in my son’s house?”
Through the window, I could see a muscular, blocky-looking man with a cell phone to his ear, standing in front of a silver SUV. He was clean-shaven with close-cut graying hair. His silhouette matched Victor’s, from the squat build to the flat ears.
He wore an unbuttoned black plaid shirt over what looked like old-fashioned Japanese scale armor, except that the metal scales were alive and moving. Loose khaki pants and brown leather shoes completed the look. If not for the insects, he could have been someone’s crotchety old grandfather.
I couldn’t make out the queen amidst the rest of the insects clinging to his body, but she had to be there. I lowered my gun and turned the chamber to setting five. One shot should be enough to take him down. The man was essentially a walking conductor.
“How did you know we were here?” I asked. If my guess was right, neither I nor the vampires were going to like his answer.
“Your friend Moon,” he said, confirming my gut feeling. “He overheard you talking, and we persuaded him to share. If we’d gotten to your house a little faster, we would have caught you before you left and saved everyone time.”
I studied his companions, trying to figure out how they had overpowered a sparkler. Sanguinarius Meyerii weren’t invulnerable, but they were awfully close.
Three more wendigos stood around Harrison. Their features were too distorted to guess what they had originally looked like. Flattened noses sat atop protruding jaws. Their lips were chapped and bloody, stretched between human and animal. They blinked too much, a side effect I remembered from my research. In rats, the fluids of the eyes had never fully adapted to the change.
Behind them stood a man and a woman who appeared fully human. Each one held an oversized book in their hands. Both were Asian, and looked to be roughly my age, or perhaps a little younger. The woman had a single lock of green-dyed hair framing the left side of her face. The man wore an awful sweater with a piano
