Oliver turned and pointed to Claire, then gestured imperatively for her to go ahead of him.

As bait?

It didn’t seem like the moment to have an argument, since everything was being done in such silence. Claire edged out ahead of him with her LED light pointed down toward her feet; it served only to make the darkness around her seem more dense and choking. She narrowly avoided a dangerous eye-level collision with a protruding metal corner, ducked, and crept forward. The ceiling was getting lower, it seemed, and she could hear a faint squeaking sound that she assumed was more rats sounding an alarm.

Claire swept the light forward, trying to see where she was going, and … and there was Derrick.

Derrick was dead. Drained white. And there were huge, unreal puncture marks in his neck, and ragged skin around them. One single drop of red had trailed down his neck and dripped on the concrete underneath, and his eyes were open, wide and surprised. They’d gone dull and filmed with grey – dried out from exposure to the air.

Claire gasped and jumped backward. She couldn’t help it; coming up on a dead man here, in the creepy zone, was something that woke instincts she couldn’t control no matter how hard she tried. She almost banged her head on the sharp metal corner she’d avoided, but Oliver’s outstretched hand stopped her cold. ‘Quiet,’ he whispered, and his voice was about as sharp and uncaring as the metal. ‘He’s been dead for hours, beyond anyone’s help. There’s something in here with us.’

‘Something?’

‘Yes. It doesn’t smell like a vampire, though it moves like one.’ That sounded … ominous. Claire paused to unzip her backpack and take out the sharp, shiny knife that Dr Anderson had given her. She wished she had something more long-range, like Shane’s flamethrower, but she stopped the thought almost immediately; Shane had always told her, you fight with what you’ve got, not what you want to have. ‘There’s a door beyond the body. Go open it. We may need to move through quickly.’

Again, she was bait – warm, pulsing bait that anything even remotely like a vampire would find tastily attractive. And she knew that he meant her to be just exactly that, but at the same time, it was a decent strategic move. Jesse was somewhere in the shadows with her own killer knife; Oliver was a deadly force even without a weapon. And Eve, somewhere beyond him, was more than capable of helping out, even unarmed. It wasn’t just her wit that could be deadly.

Claire stepped carefully over Derrick’s body – and didn’t that give her a nightmare flash from every horror movie, ever – and moved toward the single, small door that was set low in the wall. It was too small to go through standing up. She put the flashlight in her teeth and pulled the door handle, and it protested – not locked, just a tight fit. Her second yank got it free, and it swung open with surprising silence. She’d expected an appropriately eerie creak, at the very least, but someone had – ominously – oiled it to ensure it didn’t make noise.