And then something hit her, hard and stunningly without warning, from the left, and the flashlight spun away.

Claire didn’t even have a chance to cry out; her breath was driven out of her in a soundless burst an instant before her vocal cords responded, and then she was flat on her back with her head ringing from impact with a metal pipe, and she couldn’t understand what had happened, and there was something leaning over her, something pale and naked and awful with eyes like a cesspool on fire, and she felt the cold dribble of its saliva on her throat. It was only an instant, but it was a snapshot of a nightmare: a distorted mirror of a human being, with a hugely exaggerated jaw open far too wide with vampire fangs wider and longer than she’d ever seen extended and ready to cut. The nose was smashed and shrunken like a bat’s, the ears shrivelled little clumps at the sides of the head, and if the thing had ever had hair, it was long gone. Impossible to say if it was male or female; Claire couldn’t even imagine thinking of it that way.

And then it was lunging for her throat.

She reacted instinctively, shoving the knife deep into its chest. That helped – it kept it away from her throat. But it was still snapping at her, not dying nearly fast enough. She shut her eyes convulsively, and that was good, because she didn’t see what happened next, though she inferred it later. Instead of the icy bite on her neck, she felt a sudden chilly splatter of liquid flood over her that smelt rancid, like raw meat left in the fridge for months on end. The weight on her convulsed and fell away, and Claire balled up in a protected fetal curve toward the wall, retching.

The thing’s head bumped against her hip and rolled away. Decapitated, by Jesse’s extremely sharp knife. ‘Claire. Claire!’ Jesse’s calm, cool voice, and her hand on Claire’s shoulder. ‘Up. We need to go, quickly.’

It was almost impossible to shake that horrible event off that easily, but Claire somehow managed … she accepted Jesse’s help in standing and retched again, emptily, at the stench of the dead thing that had tried to kill her. It was a vampire, she guessed, but not any kind of vamp she knew about. Even Myrnin’s lab mistakes – and he’d made more than a few of them – weren’t quite that disgusting. It was like some kind of a bastardised DNA merger of bat, human and spider. She tried not to look at it too closely as Jesse hustled her back to the now-open small door. Thankfully, Jesse didn’t ask her to go first; the vampire woman, although taller, easily bent and moved fluidly through the narrow opening. Claire followed her, scrambling on hands and knees in the claustrophobic concrete space. No conduits in here, at least. Claire realised she’d dropped her flashlight in preference to keeping hold of her knife, but even as she did, Eve moved in behind her and flipped hers on to light the way. ‘You okay?’ Eve mumbled – and when Claire glanced back, she realised Eve was holding the flashlight in her mouth, the better to crawl forward.