Silver rained down into the water, and where it touched, the water turned black, rotten and foul with dead draug.

The singing must have changed pitch, because even through the earplugs I could hear the screaming.

A hand shoved me down flat, and a shotgun clattered to the pavement next to me. My new vamp friend was still upright, standing over me now, firing steadily as draug tried to escape from the pond’s poisonous waters.

I got up to my knees and fired, too, choking on the stench of gunpowder and the moldy flavor of the draug.

Finally, the rain eased, then puttered to a stop, and Adele fired the last shot into the pulpy mass of a draug, blasting it into slime …

… And it was over.

Me, and the vampires.

Victorious.

My new friend reached down and offered me a hand up. I took it, breathless and shaking, and the help turned into a handshake.

Adele gave me a cool assessment, raised an eyebrow, and mouthed, Not bad.

Just like that, I was part of the team.

Lucky for us, the rest of the trip wasn’t quite so eventful.

CHAPTER SIX

CLAIRE

“She should be back by now,” Michael said, checking his cell phone as they followed Myrnin out of the lab and into yet another maze of hallways. “Claire. You text her.”

“Her cell won’t work,” Claire said. “The human network’s still down, except for police and emergency workers.” The vampire network was, of course, fully operational … at least for now. “Maybe one of the guys with her …?”

“I don’t know who they are,” Michael said, and frowned at the screen. “She ought to be back.”

What he really meant was that he ought to be with her, Claire thought, but she didn’t say that out loud. “She’s okay,” she assured him. “Eve knows her way around town, just like you do. Just like Shane.” It was true, but she knew it wasn’t particularly comforting. The draug represented an entirely new dimension of danger that not even Morganville natives were fully equipped to handle. “She’s got loads of vamp firepower.”

“Yeah,” he said softly, and for a moment she saw a flash of red in his blue eyes. “Look how that turned out before.”

Ouch. She had a sudden vivid vision of him crouched over Eve’s motionless body, his fangs in her neck. The look on his face, the desperate and unholy joy of it … it haunted her. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to be in his head right now, or for that matter, in Eve’s. That moment had destroyed all the expectations they might have had about themselves.

“She’ll be okay,” Shane said. “Let’s worry about us, bro. Because no matter how much of a little operation Myrnin wants to tell us this is, it ain’t.”

Michael nodded. He still looked pale and miserable, and he wasn’t going to get much better until Eve got back … and maybe not even then, if things were as bad as she feared.