The vamps shattered one of the big steel-wire-reinforced windows in the shadows, and began piling inside. I joined up with Michael and Captain Obvious. “Where the hell are we going?” Captain Obvious asked, which was—heh—a perfectly obvious question, really.

And I knew the answer, without even thinking about it. “The pool.” MHS had its own indoor pool. I’d been on the swim team, so I knew all about that. It wasn’t a great pool, and in retrospect I was surprised the vampires had been persuaded to allow one to be built at all, but I supposed they’d figured one more enclosed indoor pool wouldn’t hurt.

No. They closed down the pool. Drained it. Filled it in. It’s not there anymore. Wake up, idiot.

The voice in my head wouldn’t shut up. Of course the pool was there. Now the surviving draug had withdrawn to this one spot, this place where I’d swum meets and won prizes. It was a personal place to me, and they’d violated it.

They were trapped.

So are you!

They were stranded, because of the closed valves on the pipes and the silver nitrate in the water.

Wake up, Shane!

I shot my first draug halfway through the hallway; he was hiding in a classroom and oozed out of the shadows to grab a vampire by the back of the neck. The vamp had twisted free, and as soon as she was out of range I yelled and fired, and the silver shotgun pellets ripped the draug apart in a splatter of colorless liquid that smoked on the floor. It tried to reform, but another vampire—Myrnin, in his black leather—took what looked like a salt shaker from his pocket and tapped out some metallic powder into the mess.

Silver. It set the scraps of the draug on fire, and when the blaze was done, there was nothing but a damp smear on the floor.

Myrnin bared his fangs in a fierce grin, and we went on.

Nothing had changed in the school since I’d last been inside—the same lockers, dented and scratched; the same classroom doors; the same trophies in the case. I’d won at least two of them.

They were still there, with my name shining on them.

You never won any trophies, Shane. Of course I had. I’d always wanted to win them, and I had. This is a fantasy—don’t you get that? Wake up!

About a hundred draug later, we reached the pool, and we hadn’t lost a single one of our party along the way. But the pool was a different story. Firing shotguns loaded with silver in a room full of vampires was pretty damn dangerous, so only the first and second ranks got to have the firepower; the rest of us had to wait until the first rank had to reload, and then we pushed forward, dropped to one knee, and fired steadily at the mass of draug—the identical faces, the bland and empty not-people with things shivering inside them—as they approached. A second rank fired over our heads. My ears went quickly numb from the pounding, shattering roars of the guns, but I didn’t care. What I cared about was making every single shot count.