Junkies seeking their particular brand of crack.

I had a shotgun loaded with silver, but there was no way to get it into position to hurt the one on my back without doing damage to myself. My strength didn’t work well against the draug, because they were mush in this form, and when something has a blob of a body, it’s difficult to get anything like a real grip.

I scraped it off against the rough brick side of the building, and my shirt got torn in the process. The skin beneath felt burned and raw, and already I seemed noticeably weaker.

Worse: the noise cancellation device that I’d been wearing clipped to my belt was shattered. I held my breath and tried not to listen … and then realized that I didn’t need to worry. The draug weren’t singing here. Not at all. Not even a hum. If they’d been able to make that sound, I’d have lost my focus, gotten confused, been overtaken … but something had happened to them, something to impair their ability to generate that call. When they’d first arrived in Morganville, they hadn’t been able to sing, either. Magnus had gone after vampires one by one, and only when he had a certain number of draug under his command could he start that eerie, beautiful call that drew us in against our will.

We must have killed enough, at least for now, to rob him of that power. Eve would have, at this point, said, “Go us!” but I wasn’t feeling especially victorious. I was feeling weak. Got to keep moving. The whole point of this was to draw Magnus’s attention and get the rest of the draug to come after me; they needed all the hot, tasty vampire they could get, and I was right here, waiting. But if I waited too long, I could draw them right into my friends instead, especially if I stuck too close to the building itself.

I avoided the puddle, which looked too still, and moved on.

On the side of the plant was a long chain-link fence, posted with warning signs. These made handy grips as I scaled up and over and dropped on the other side … then saw the treatment pools. The water was also treated in the pipes, but there was some kind of system I didn’t fully understand to take it from gray to clean, and each of the pools looked different—a progression of treatments. There were also covered sections and containers on the other side of the fences, probably for taking samples. All in all, it was pretty much Draug Heaven … as long as they didn’t mind questionable water quality.

And I was in trouble, because I almost immediately realized that the pool nearest to me had waves in it. Thin, small waves at the far end, building into large tidal surges as they approached the edges of the ponds.

They were coming for me, and I was already weak. If another one got hold of me, I’d end up at the bottom of that pond, helpless and hopeless this time.