I could feel Eric’s arm tense beside me, and then with the speed of a striking snake he leaned forward to clear Mindy Simpson to his left, his right arm rose up, and he swung in to stake Victor in the chest. As a sneak attack it was perfect. Eric would have hit the mark exactly if Akiro, with equally terrifying speed, hadn’t whipped out his sword and brought it down as Eric moved.

Mindy Simpson was doomed to be in the wrong place at the wrong second. Akiro’s sword struck her shoulder during its passage to Eric’s arm and simply hewed through it, her bones and flesh slowing the lethal blade almost long enough for Eric to escape.

All hell broke loose.

Mindy screamed and died within seconds, and the amount of blood was simply incredible. While she died, a lot of things happened almost simultaneously. As Mark was still gaping, Victor was trying to shove aside Mindy’s slumping and bleeding body, Akiro was trying to disentangle his sword, and Eric was ducking and moving forward to evade another slice of the sword. Eric’s arm was bleeding, but thanks to Mindy’s unintentional block, it was still operative. I stood and lunged backward to get out of the way, knocking my chair aside, and rammed right into Luis, who was launching himself forward to protect his master. I spoiled Luis’s trajectory, and we ended up in a heap on the floor. Fortunately for me, he was too intent on the vampire part of the fight to consider me at all dangerous, and he simply used me as a springboard to push off.

Not that that felt exactly good, but it wasn’t fatal.

I scrambled up to a crouch and tried to figure out what to do next. In the dimmed lights, it wasn’t easy to decide what was happening. A fighting pair close to the club doors proved to be Palomino and Antonio, and a small figure flying through the air must have been Thalia. She meant to land on Akiro’s back, but he turned at the last second—so incredibly fast—and instead she hit his chest, and he staggered. His sword was not a weapon for close fighting, not with Thalia doing her best to rip his throat out with her teeth.

Mark Simpson was staggering away from the body of his wife and the fighting vampires, and he was saying, “Oh my God, oh my God,” over and over. But he did manage to take cover behind the bar, where he grabbed a bottle and began trying to find someone to hit. I felt I could handle Mark Simpson, and I pushed to my feet.

Colton took care of it before I could get there. He grabbed his own bottle and swung it at the back of Mark Simpson’s head, and Mark staggered and went down.