despite the explosions of flesh and blood from his back.
Time slowed to a crawl. I had al the time in the world to watch the huge black man fal backward in
slow motion off the stairs to slam into the Dumpster. As his body bounced lifelessly to the floor of the
al ey, the fire door swung solidly closed with an echoing clang.
With the disappearance of the light and my escape route, the vamps grew bolder, two of them moving
forward as a third dropped from the fire escape of a nearby building, landing soft and silent as a
snowflake.
There was no time for a stake, my remaining squirt gun was
was a Derringer. Two shots. None of it was going to do me a damned bit of good against these
numbers. Then Bob shifted, struggling against my attempt to keep him stil . He grunted in pain from the
effort, and while he couldn’t talk, the movement showed me he had a backup gun he hadn’t shown me
earlier.
Bless you, Bob.
I set him onto the ground and drew his weapon. Stepping back, I settled into a shooting stance, my
back against the fire door.
The vampires were moving in slowly. I didn’t think it was from caution, although they knew what silver
bul ets can do. It was more to savor the moment, revel in the scent of my fear. Because in the end,
even the toughest human is afraid of the monsters.
I fired, and the loads in his gun were hot enough that the textured grip tore at the skin on my palm.
Instead of a clean shot to the heart, the barrel pul ed up and right, so that the bul et sliced through the
vampire’s neck. It took out his spine, and blood sprayed in a fountain from the severed arteries.
Too many deaths in too smal a space. The smel of blood and meat fil ed the al ey, overwhelming
even the stench of rotting garbage.
It hadn’t been intentional, but it was at least graphic enough to stop the other bats in their tracks for a
second. I kept firing, adjusting for the pul from the loads, trying for heart shots in the hope of breaking
the pack or at least slowing them down.
It didn’t work. The tal est, a lanky male with red hair and freckles who looked like Opie, bared fangs.
Apparently he was one of the leaders. One look from him and they moved, circling like a pack of
animals on the hunt. He hissed, baring fangs at me a second time. It was an inhuman sound. Every
hair on my body stood at attention. My pulse thundered in my ears. But I held my ground and fired
again.
The first shot missed. He’d moved fast: too damned fast, launching himself at me with everything he
had. I kept firing, even as his body slammed into mine, driving me into the door behind me with a force
that drove the air from my lungs and fractured ribs. My head slammed into the heavy steel hard enough
that for just a second I saw stars. The gun fel from my hand, but at least he was done. I’d taken his
heart. Hel , I’d taken most of his damned
pinned by the mass of his lifeless body. The others used that to their advantage. The ones who hadn’t
stopped to feast on Bob and the other guard closed in on me. There was no more time. I twisted and
ducked, managing to break loose long enough to pul one of my knives from its wrist sheath. I slashed
at random, cutting at anything and everything that came into range—praying al the while that the magic
in the razor-sharp blades would work as advertised but knowing that the first time I used them would
probably be the last.
As the vampires closed in and I went down in a flash of intense pain, I heard a scream and realized it
was my own voice.
Dying was going to suck.
3
Voices floated over me from a distance. I could hear them, knew I should recognize them, but I
couldn’t make my eyes open, let alone focus my mind.
Too much pain, from too many sources. I couldn’t feel parts of my body that I knew I
to, and other parts that normal y stayed in the background were front and center.
“We need to get her to the hospital.” A woman’s voice. I knew that voice. Dammit, who
“No! They’d just stake her and take off her head.” A man.
“Maybe they should.” Cold, rational. A thought I’d have if I could think straight.
“She’s not a bat. She’s not going to
made my cheeks feel warm. Or maybe it was just that everything else felt so cold.
A pause, and then a skeptical tone to her words. “You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do. I can tel .”
“Because she’s your
she didn’t like me, that was for damned sure.
“I keep tel ing you. She’s
somebody who can help her. Take her back to the lab. I’l make some cal s.”
I felt my body being lifted, and coherent thought was swal owed in a dark wave.
4
I rose to consciousness slowly, like floating back to the top of a deep pool fil ed with cold black water.
I knew who I was. But I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. The last thing I remembered
clearly was wrestling the mirror I’d bought for Vicki’s birthday into the Miata and heading for
Birchwoods. The mirror hadn’t wanted to fit. In fact, it’d been enough of a problem that I’d been
seriously glad of the protection charms I’d had put onto it.
There had been no danger, no threat. It made no sense for me to have been unconscious.
Sounds and smel s that were starting to filter through the fog in my brain: The whir and beeping of
medical equipment I understood, but stale pizza, french fries, and Chopin’s
It took more wil than was pretty to force my eyes open, but I managed.
I wasn’t in the hospital. I was on a slab in a lab. A very familiar lab, as it turned out. I recognized the
gleaming wal tiles with flecks of gold and black and the acoustical ceiling towering forty feet above my
head. I’d stared at those tiles and that recessed lighting many times before, soaking in the words of
one professor or another. While I couldn’t actual y see them, I knew that there were seats set up in an
auditorium-style semicircle, with wide concrete steps leading up to the higher rows. Painted metal pipe
bent so as not to have any sharp edges served as the handrails up the steps. They were
