Except that there weren’t enough of them. A few, sure—five, six on each side. There had to be a lot more of them that were strong enough to leave the pool. We’d killed many of them, but not that many; they’d been all over us inside when we’d come earlier. That meant that they were likely still inside.

With Eve.

I needed to draw them out, and to do that I had to present either a genuine opportunity … or a genuine threat. Preferably both.

I did two things.

First, I extended my fangs and ripped open my own wrist, and let the dark red blood—loaded with those delicious vampire pheromones the draug loved—spray out all over the ground around me. “Soup’s on, guys. Come get some.”

Next, as the draug charged me, I backed up against the fence, pumped the shotgun, and began to methodically kill them all. I’d never been one for killing things, but I’d had plenty of video game practice.

Turns out all that first-person shooter stuff is actually good for something. Especially in Morganville.

I was killing the last one—or at least, turning it back into splatters of liquid that crawled away to the safety of a pool—when my cell phone rang. Eve had changed my ringtone, again. She’d sampled one of my concerts. Weird, to hear my own music coming out of the speaker.

I grabbed the phone and thumbed it on. “Kind of busy right now!” I said, before the novelty of my cell phone actually working dawned on me. “Who is this?”

“Moses,” came the breathless reply. “We’ve got Shane. Heading for the truck. Claire and Eve are pinned down on the main stairs. Go get them.”

I was about to confirm all that when I heard the draug start shrieking. I wasn’t prepared for it; the noise went through me like an arrow through the head, and I almost dropped the phone, but I managed to hang it up and get it back in my pocket. I didn’t know what had happened to hurt them that badly, but even though the screaming hurt, it made me savagely happy, too.

It would damn sure keep them busy.

I raced back over the catwalk that led through the safe pool, and broke the lock on a door to the inside of the building. There were more pools in here, just a couple, with more catwalks, and I saw that one of the pools was a thrashing, shrieking mess of silver and black that, even as I watched, quieted into stillness.

There were open canisters of silver nitrate discarded nearby. And blood. Lots of fresh human blood.

Shane’s.

The blood trail went off to the left, but I plunged straight ahead, for the stairs that went up a floor into the main lobby. I caught sight of the truck outside the doors, and figures moving around it—Hannah’s distinctive form was standing guard, so they were all safe, for now.

I ran upstairs, toward the smell of burned gunpowder, rot, and fear.