Only to stop as Myrnin backed out of the parlor room firing his shotgun. Shane spun that way, too, aimed, and fired. Claire heard a high-pitched, angry screech. They’d hit Magnus again. Shane muttered a curse and fired twice in rapid succession, then shoved Myrnin up the hallway toward the living room. Toward her.

“Okay?” he shouted at her.

She managed a shaky smile and made an OK symbol with her thumb and forefinger.

Magnus slid/slithered/lurched into the hallway behind him.

Claire gasped and screamed, “Behind you!” Shane lunged forward, landed on his stomach, rolled, and fired upward at Magnus as he came toward him. From the doorway Claire saw more people entering the hall—Michael, Eve, Jason? And even, improbably, Miranda.

They all had shotguns. Even the kid.

Michael’s shot hit Magnus dead-on from behind as Myrnin and Shane rolled out of the line of fire, and Claire ducked behind the wall. Eve’s shot came a second later.

Magnus pitched forward to the wood floor, oozing blackened fluids.

He didn’t move.

“We got him,” Michael said. “Claire? Shane? You okay? We got him!”

“No,” Myrnin called, and kept crawling, well away from Magnus’s body. “Not so easily. Careful!”

It was good he said it, because it forced Michael to slow down—and when Magnus reared up, reaching for him with pale, strong hands, he had time to skip backward and fire again, point-blank.

Magnus made a horribly liquid gurgling sound, but it wasn’t pain; it was amusement.

Michael backed up fast, pulling Eve with him. They ran into Jason, who was staring at the whole thing as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “What the hell is it?” he asked. “That’s not a vamp. That’s—”

“Watch out!” Claire cried, and so did Miranda, almost in chorus, as Magnus’s vaguely man-shaped form rippled, changed, and rolled forward. Michael, vamp-fast, pulled Eve out of the way.

But Jason just … stood there.

Out of nowhere, Miranda stepped ahead of him and pushed him aside, looked straight at Claire, and said, “It has to be like this. It’s okay.”

And Magnus then rolled over her.

Miranda disappeared into him, absorbed the way Shane had been at the water treatment plant—trapped inside the bubble of draug fluid. But unlike that time, where they’d been trying to keep Shane alive, Magnus had no interest in Miranda at all.

Claire saw her … dissolve. Like flesh dropped in acid. Miranda disappeared in a cloudy mist of red, and in a matter of seconds, what was left of her oozed out to clatter on the floor.

Bones.

Eve screamed, and Michael grabbed her and held her close. Jason had gone milky pale, but he raised his shotgun and fired, three times, straight into Magnus’s body.

Magnus ignored it.

Myrnin scrambled up and jammed more shotgun shells into the weapon, then racked it. “None of this will work,” he said. “There’s only one thing that can kill him.”

Shane was up, too, and he was breathing hard, fighting, Claire thought, not to be sick after what they’d just seen happen. “What?” he demanded. “Because this son of a bitch has to die.”