It was a melee and a bloodbath, and neither monsters nor heroines escaped unscathed. Luckily, though, the monsters were the only ones to perish.

Angelique was the first to go down, her foot finding a patch of ice under the snow, and instantly she became chum to the two-legged sharks above her. She cried out when fangs found her calf, and burying her dagger up to the hilt into the beast’s head, he fell to the side, only to be replaced by another as equally voracious. It sank its canines into her thigh, and Angelique let out an agonizing scream, and it was that scream that brought Ruby and Polly to her rescue. Slicing and slashing, by the time they pulled Angelique to her feet, the air around them was fogged by the steam of warm blood flowing from severed limbs.

Unable to keep her eyes off Lisa for fear the woman would succumb to the beasts swarming around them, Bennett was the next to find the snow. Distracted, she was watching Lisa instead of watching out for herself, and caught off guard, they sacked Bennett like a college quarterback. Piling on top of her, they snarled and snapped like crazed hyenas, their teeth sinking through her clothes to the skin below, and then Bennett suddenly felt the load grow lighter. As each second passed, it became easier to breathe, and when the light of the moon found her, so did Lisa and Polly.

Lisa offered Bennett a hand and promptly yanked the woman to her feet. “Now is not the time to make snow angels, sweetheart,” she said before shoving Bennett to the side. Lisa deftly removed the legs of an oncoming attacker before turning back to Bennett. “And I love you, so please don’t die. Okay?”

Lisa pivoted back to the army, and with newly found energy, Bennett took to the battlefield again and fought her way through the crush of starving vampires. Her attention now solely on the horde, Bennett’s strikes were never truer, and as the snow-covered lawn became stained with crimson, steaming like a sewer grate in a New York winter, five women coated in the blood and guts of Napoleon’s supposed army…reigned supreme.

***

The night became eerily quiet as they stood near the house, and the air smelled of pine and blood. The lawn was littered with the dregs of Napoleon’s skeletal army. Those missing legs, army-crawled through the snow, trying to feed on their fallen brethren, and those armless floundered about like fish out of water for they had nothing to right themselves with. They were harmless now, merely torsos atop which still sat heads. They moved about without aim or purpose, disoriented and vanquished, yet still as rabid as they’d become when their collars had gone from red to green.