Maybe they were dead and gone.

But it was my neighborhood, and we didn’t allow bad things to happen here. Not here.

Not even to vampires who wouldn’t give me their names.

I found the first one walking along half a block down; it was one of the two who’d been in the backseat with me. His headphones were gone, and he looked … vacant. Dammit. I didn’t know how to stop him, short of killing him; he was shambling along with a purpose, drawn by the eerie song of the draug toward a watery grave.

I ran back toward the car, looking, and found signs of a struggle. Smashed fence at Mrs. Grather’s house, some bloodstains, and a broken headset. I tried it, and it still lit up, even though the headband had snapped in half. I ditched the shotgun and dashed back to the vamp, who was still walking along, and sneaked up behind him to slap the two halves of the headphones in place over his ears.

He took another couple of steps, with me awkwardly duck-walking with him as I held the pieces in place, then stopped and reached up to hold the headphones himself as I pulled back. Then he turned and faced me, and instead of seeing just another vampire, I saw … a young man, maybe twenty-five or so. He had thick brown wavy hair, cut into a vaguely old style, and he had dark eyes, or at least they looked that way in the gloomy afternoon.

Kinda cute, in a bookish sort of way. He nodded to me and said, “Thank you.” At least, that was how I read his lips. He gave me an awkward, shallow bow, too.

I wished I knew his name, suddenly, but there wasn’t much point in conversing, seeing as how he had his headphones on and I had squishy earplugs. I gestured for him to follow me, and ran back toward where I’d dropped the shotgun. No sign of draug, at least here; my new friend kept up with me easily. He nodded in a way that I interpreted to mean wait here, and dashed in a blur back to the car, where he dropped his broken headphones and, in almost the same gesture, grabbed a new pair from the dashboard and snugged them in place. I saw his body language relax as they kicked in.

Okay, that explained him. It didn’t explain the lack of Adele and the others. We made awkward sign language Q&A for a bit, and I got that there had been a draug popping up, and his headphones had gotten snapped, and Adele and the others had chased the draug. No props to Adele for tactical smarts, obviously, but before he’d succumbed to the singing, my new buddy had seen which way they’d gone.

So we followed, both now armed with shotguns.

We rounded the corner into the middle of a micro-rainstorm.

I mean, one second it was clear, the next there was a blinding curtain of rain that smashed down from the sky in a thick silver flood, and it was as cold as ice and took my breath away as it hit me. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could feel a burning creeping over my exposed skin.