The bottle was empty. I went to the cooler and got a six-pack, and worked my way through that while trying to forget about my dad’s furious disappointment with me, his abuse, his willingness to sacrifice me for the cause … and then once I’d pushed that back, all the times that I’d been at the mercy of a pair of fangs, and helpless. Too many times, in Morganville.

And then, I brooded about the draug.

They were the worst, the draug – creatures in the water, creatures that were worse than the vampires and more alien than anything I could really imagine. They didn’t have feelings, except cold hunger, and they’d had me for a long time in their tanks. Feeding on me. Trapping me in dreams, and nightmares, until I wasn’t sure I could tell the difference between the two any more.

By the time I’d managed to work through that trauma, I was out of beer, and stumbling drunk, and I felt … empty. Just empty. No more anger, no more fear … just a vast vacuum that needed filling with something other than all the fury I’d held inside, and finally released.

I needed Claire. Needed her.

And so I clumsily unlocked Florey’s, reset the alarm as I left, and weaved along the silent sidewalks heading for her apartment. I didn’t think ahead to what I was going to say to her. I guess in my beer-soaked mind it would all just magically work out, and she’d be so happy to see me she’d forget about everything else. Because everybody loves having the drunken self-pitying boyfriend banging on their door at Jesus, four-thirty in the morning. At the time, hey, it seemed like a fabulous idea.

I never got there.

See, I forgot all the lessons that had been drilled into my head in Morganville: first, never get stumbling drunk, because you never know when you’re going to need your wits and reflexes about you. Second, see the first rule.

And third, never ever do it after dark.

For some reason, I thought that Morganville was the equivalent of Dead Space Level Twelve, and having survived that, I didn’t rate the nerdy, vampire-free streets of Cambridge at more than a Level Two.

Turns out that it wasn’t vampires I had to worry about. It was just a gang of guys who’d finished off their night badly and were looking for somebody to blame, and I was staggering down the wrong damn street. There were six of them, and approximately one quarter of me, and those weren’t good odds in any game.