The Master of the Dead looked at him. “Pick a direction, I’ll tell you how many.”

“Is there a direction in which there aren’t vampires?” Andrea asked.

“No.”

Curran glanced at me.

“Down is as good as any,” I said, and pulled my saber out. It didn’t feel like Slayer, probably because it wasn’t Slayer. Slayer lay broken in Curran’s pack.

“Down it is.”

The two wererats dropped into the gap, and Curran followed. I jumped after him, and he leaped up to meet me, caught me in the air, and landed on soft feet.

“Fancy,” I told him, scanning one end of the room, while he peered at the other. This floor appeared to be a high-end gym, filled with rows of ellipticals and treadmills.

“Trying to impress, baby.” Curran set me on my feet, caught Ghastek, and handed him off to Jim none too gently. We started moving. The machines stood in a single row to the left and in another two rows with a path between them to the right. Above them flat screens, now dull and dusty, mourned the passing of the tech age on their swivel mounts.

The multiple points of undead magic shifted, streaming toward us.

“Incoming,” Ghastek said. “Moving fast. They probably found a point of entry to this floor.”

We backed away.

A gaunt, skeletal shape squeezed through a crack in the wall near the ceiling and sat there, fastened to the wall with huge talons, the two red eyes like burning coals.

“Above and to the right,” I murmured.

“I see him,” Curran answered.

Another undead squeezed out of the gap and crawled next to the first one. This one was clearly older. The ridge of bony protrusions along his spine rose at least three inches, and his jaws looked like a bear trap. Across from us a third vampire crawled out of a dark crack in the other wall. This one felt old, too. A long ragged scar marked its face, trailing down over its chest past the point I could see. A cannibal vampire. The two words didn’t even go together. What’s next, zombie pirate Viking ghosts?

A shape flickered across the corner of my eye, dashing behind the treadmills. Another moved in the corner. Six vampires had entered the room, and they were stalking us. This wouldn’t be pretty.

“There are many vampires,” Christopher reported.

“Shhh,” I told him. “Keep moving.”

Vampires reacted to prey that ran, so we didn’t run. We moved quietly and steadily toward the back of the room.

The ancient vampire on the right wall slunk down. Behind us, an undead leaped onto the treadmill and perched there, like some mutated hairless cat. More undead eyes glared at us through the gaps in the machines.

Not good.

Something clanged ahead. I glanced that way. Thomas had found a huge metal door.

“Locked,” he called out quietly.

Nice. Beating on it would definitely provoke the vampires.