Time slowed to a crawl. I had all the time in the world to watch the huge black man fall backward in slow motion off the stairs to slam into the Dumpster. As his body bounced lifelessly to the floor of the alley, 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.

Fuck a duck.

There was no time for a stake, my remaining squirt gun was literally a one-shot, and my backup gun 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 still. 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 bullets 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 pulled up and right, so that the bullet 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 small a space. The smell of blood and meat filled the alley, 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 pull 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 tallest, 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 fell from my hand, but at least he was done. I’d taken his heart. Hell, I’d taken most of his damned chest. I was soaked with blood. I struggled to move, but I was 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 pull one of my knives from its wrist sheath. I slashed at random, cutting at anything and everything that came into range—praying all 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 should be able to, and other parts that normally 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 was she?

“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 be a bat.” Such determination. He sounded positive and that 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 tell.”

“Because she’s your Vaso?” Now the woman’s voice practically dripped venom. Whoever she was, she didn’t like me, that was for damned sure.

“I keep telling you. She’s not my Vaso.” The man’s voice was growing desperate. “Look, I know somebody who can help her. Take her back to the lab. I’ll make some calls.”

I felt my body being lifted, and coherent thought was swallowed in a dark wave.

4

I rose to consciousness slowly, like floating back to the top of a deep pool filled with cold black water.

What the hell? What’s happening to me?

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 smells 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 Nocturnes?

It took more will 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 wall 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 actually 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 painted glossy black to match the rubberized strips that served as trim and skid stops on the stairs themselves. This was the room where Warren Landingham gave his lectures on controlling zombies and ghouls.

It seemed a little strange that while I wasn’t a zombie or ghoul, I’d been strapped onto the slab and put in restraints.

Oh, shit. I don’t like restraints. I have never liked restraints. I have my reasons—reasons that I won’t go into with anyone ever again if I have my say. Those memories were magically blunted, not erased, and I felt an instant wave of pure, high-octane terror.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to take slow, deep breaths the way I’d been taught. It helped a little. I can do this. I’m alive. This isn’t the past. This is now. I’m not in too much pain, which means I’m not in bad shape. When I opened my eyes I wasn’t calm, but I had managed to beat back the panic for the moment.

There were tubes running from my arm to the medical machinery clicking and beeping to my right. But I felt fine.

So why restraints? And why no injuries? I felt my stomach tighten as another wave of panic prepared to hit.

I let myself be distracted by the click of heels on linoleum just outside of my vision. The footsteps were louder than usual, but I recognized the rhythm of the footfalls. Emma Landingham. As ever, she was the personification of brisk efficiency. Her clothes didn’t wrinkle or her hose run. Ever. They simply didn’t dare, any more than her honey-colored hair would ever hope to escape from the tight confines of its bun. I vaguely remembered hearing voices. Had one of them been Emma? I wasn’t sure. But it would make sense.

“What’s up?” I tried to speak. The croak I managed wasn’t even close to coherent. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Emma, what’s going on?”

She turned with a swift movement that was the essence of energy contained. I’ve never seen anyone alive or dead move like that who wasn’t a gymnast. No surprise there. She’d been one. Emma wasn’t graceful but was capable of explosive movements: power, energy. And she was beautiful: petite golden blond perfection, as opposed to Vicki’s tall, dark elegance and Dawna’s exotic beauty. I was definitely the duckling in our crowd.

“Who are you?” Emma snapped the question out sharply without even bothering to look up from the readout she was scanning. Gee, glad to see she was worried about me.

“Celia Graves.” The “s” sound in “Celia” sounded … wrong, different from usual. It took me a second to realize why. I had acquired the barest touch of a lisp. I’d never had a speech impediment. I didn’t even have an accent. Pure plain American English without any telltale anything. Not even the highly mocked but reasonably accurate “Valley girl” dialect.

I tried to lick my lips and found … fangs. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—

The words ran through my brain over and over. I found myself gulping in air and had to close my eyes and forced myself to go back to the breathing exercises. When I’d reached the point where I thought I could speak normally, I tried again. “What the fuck is going on, Emma?” I tried to sound tough. Pure bravado.

Fear produces biological reactions. Fight or flight. Neither was a viable option right now, but I wasn’t going to convince my nervous system of that. Adrenaline rushed through my veins, clearing away the last of the cobwebs. My body tensed, poised for action. The metal restraints groaned in response. The metal … groaned? These restraints were built to withstand a raging zombie without strain. That simple sound implied a level of strength that sent another wave of panic coursing like ice water through my veins. A normal human couldn’t put enough pressure against the restraints to do that. Which meant I wasn’t human anymore.

“Tell me about your family.”

She was testing me, making sure I had memories. Smart girl. If I had fangs I’d not only been bit by a bat, I’d also been at least partially changed. Which made no sense. Vampires generally just bite you and leave you. You either get treated and live, or you die. Once in a very great while a master vamp will do the whole bite and spell thing to bring someone over, but it’s a rare bat with the power to do it. So, if I was a vampire, I should be feral and have no memories. But if I was human, I shouldn’t have the fangs and superstrength.