“Yeah, kickbox a vampire—that’s clever,” Ruger said and swung the shotgun like a cudgel, and though Crow was able to bring the sword up in time to parry it, Ruger was only using the attack as a ruse to step in close. He clamped one icy hand around Crow’s sword wrist and with the other he punched him in the stomach hard enough to knock all the air out of the world. Crow managed to turn enough to deflect most of the force, but what connected was still like a bullet in the gut. Crow felt something tear inside. There wasn’t enough air to scream and Crow sank down to his knees.
Ruger bent down and leered at him. “Ooo—where’s all the fancy kung-fu moves now, dickhead?”
Ruger raised his fist to punch again and hesitated as the ground beneath them suddenly trembled with the rumbling thunder of an earthquake. Crow stared stupidly down, trying to decide whether it was really happening or if he was going into some kind of convulsion. The tremor passed and Ruger’s smile returned as he reached down and once more jerked Crow to his feet, slapped him twice across the mouth, and then pulled him close.
“You know what I’m going to do, asshole? I’m going to break your arms and legs and while you’re lying there in the mud I’m going to strip that broke-nose bitch of yours and take her in every hole she’s got. Right in front of you. I’m going to split her open and make you watch it. Maybe I’ll let all my boys here pull a train on her, ass-hump her until she’s begging me to kill her and screaming at you for being a cowardly, ineffectual little small-town piece of shit. Then, when we’ve used her all up—I’m going to turn her. Ohhh, yeah, baby. I’m going to turn that prissy bitch into one of my sluts. Then I think I’ll let you two have a nice reunion.”
Crow’s mouth was filled with blood and he gagged on it. All Crow could do was hock up the blood in his mouth and spit it at Ruger. The garlic was all but gone, but there was just enough to make Ruger wince and cough.
“Yo! Asshole!”
Ruger looked toward the sound and right into the swing of the stock of LaMastra’s shotgun. It caught him across the mouth and the vampire’s face seemed to disintegrate as he whirled down to the ground. Crow sagged, too, but LaMastra caught him with one hand and kept him up.
“Come on, man, we got to fall back and regroup.” LaMastra’s face was crisscrossed with scratches and cuts, his clothes were torn, and he looked nearly spent. “Gotta find some space to reload. I’m dry.”
Crow felt the ground firming under him and he started to say something, but then something punched him in the stomach again. It was impossible with LaMastra standing face-to-face with him just inches away, but Crow looked down and when he saw what it was the whole world twisted sideways into madness. It was a fist. A fist covered with blood that steamed like soup, a fist wrapped in coils of purple intestine and red strings of muscle fiber, a fist that seemed to have sprouted like magic from LaMastra’s stomach. Crow looked slowly up from that fist to LaMastra’s face. The detective seemed confused; he frowned, gave Crow a weary half-smile, and then coughed up a dark pint of blood onto Crow’s chest. The detective’s big body sagged down and Crow saw Ruger standing close behind him, smiling. Always smiling.
With a grunt, Ruger yanked his fist out of LaMastra’s body and let the big man slump all the way to the ground. Ruger raised his fist to his mouth and licked off some of the blood.
“VINCE!” Crow screamed as he tried to hold on to LaMastra, tried to keep the life in the young man by sheer force of will, by sheer need, but the lights in LaMastra’s eyes flickered like candles. He stared into Crow’s eyes, and his mouth formed a single word.
“No—” Then more dark blood bubbled onto LaMastra’s lips and poured out of his mouth and the flood of it extinguished the fragile light in his eyes. Crow held his friend in his arms and looked up in despair to where Ruger stood above them.
“And now it’s your turn,” Ruger whispered and took a single step forward.
Instantly a thunderbolt flashed across the flame-torn darkness and struck Ruger in the side, barreling him over, and he went down in a fighting, hissing ball with something monstrously huge and immensely powerful. The impact knocked Crow back a few steps and he stared in shock as the two bodies came to rest against a heap of sword-slashed and fire-burned corpses.
Ruger was pinned under something that was bigger and far stronger—something whose body was packed with knotted cords of muscle and whose hide rippled with a pelt of coarse red hair. Four vampires—survivors of Ruger’s elite guard—rushed in and tackled the thing and it went down as Ruger scrambled out from underneath. He rose to his feet, visibly shaken and slashed to the bone in a dozen places, but even as Crow watched the wounds began to close, the skin knit.
One of the other vampires was less fortunate, or perhaps less powerful, and he flopped onto his back with a head that was connected by a few grisly strands of meat. A second vampire catapulted back with a smashed skull. The creature just shook off the other two as it rose into a fighting crouch, facing Ruger. Instantly they began stalking one another, circling, snarling. The thing that had attacked Ruger was gigantic as it rose onto its hind legs, and even with its hunched back and misshapen legs it towered above Ruger. It had large piercing yellow eyes with catlike slits, and tall fur-covered ears that rose straight to tufted points high above the sloping skull. It had a long lupine muzzle that was wrinkled back to reveal spit-flecked teeth as sharp as spikes. The thing stood there, its chest heaving with predatory lust, its daggerlike claws rending the air. Crow stared at it and his mind nearly toppled into a shocked faint.
It was a werewolf.
For an insane moment he thought he was seeing Ubel Griswold reborn, and an atavistic terror threatened to tear the guts out of him. He reeled backward from it, but the creature’s whole attention was focused on Ruger.
A dozen more of Ruger’s guards circled the monster, but the creature didn’t wait for them to attack—it lunged at them and Crow flinched back as blood and torn chunks of meat showered him.
Val and Mike stood with their backs to a wall of flame. She fired her guns dry time and again, and while she reloaded Mike fought with the sword. Twice they felt the ground under them rumble, but there was no sign of Griswold. Even the articulated limbs had receded into the mud. Some of the vampires screamed at one another to kill the woman, but not the boy, and that gave Val and Mike a bit of an edge. When Mike rushed the attackers, they scuttled back, learning from the death of their fellows about the danger of being near this boy.
“I’m nearly out,” Val whispered to Mike as she slapped her last magazine into her pistol. Mike nodded, too exhausted to speak. The sword, which had been so light in his hands before, now felt as heavy as a sledgehammer. He looked around for Crow and LaMastra, but they were somewhere on the other side of the clearing, behind pillars of flame, if they were even still alive.