It was the kind of grandiose threat that might have sounded corny in pretty much any other circumstance. Not now. Vampires with nukes. Yeah, they get to mouth off any way they want.

The best reply I could manage was a wheezy, “Yeah … well fuck you.”

Not original, but effective. The effect was, however, that he pulled me halfway out of the nest of splinters and then slammed me back in, deeper.

“When the bombs go off,” whispered Grigor, “your own stupidity and paranoia will drive the nations together into a war that will devastate the earth. When the skies darken with ash, your kind will cower. When the fallout spreads, they will sicken and die. In the coldness of nuclear winter, the Upierczi will rise up and claim dominance.”

“Not a chance,” I said, but that was defiant bullshit.

His plan was a pretty good one. The war would probably start as soon as the bomb in Pakistan detonated. That government was conflicted and paranoid, and ever since SEAL Team Six popped a cap in Bin Laden on Pakistani soil, political tensions have been high and hostile. They would never believe that the bomb was triggered by vampires. I mean … who would believe that? Sure, I was a true believer right now, but I wasn’t going to be there to testify to the existence of monsters. No, the bomb there, the bombs in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the bomb in Louisiana, these were going to be seen as acts of war, and war would be the result. By the time anyone ever figured out what the hell was going on, the whole world would have become a hell.

And the Upierczi could live in a radioactive world. They were perfectly adapted—and genetically modified—to live in the world they were making.

The fact that this was all becoming crystal clear to me right now was a pain in the ass. Would have been nice to have put this all together back at the Arklight camp, and then sipped a beer while Church called in a multinational airstrike on Grigor.

As Church said, “If wishes were horses.”

“I thought you believed in God,” I said, fumbling for something to use as a lever. “How does this serve Him?”

“Read the Old Testament,” he said. “Our God is the God of vengeance and warfare. We are the new chosen people. We were chosen by Father Nicodemus and blessed by him in God’s name. Your kind should worship us.”

I had no answer to that. I’m not a theologian. So I again fell back on my old favorite. “Fuck you.”