Six vampires dropped into the room. For a fraction of a moment they froze, three perched on the table, three on the floor, their eyes glowing pools of scarlet hunger. Emaciated, hairless skeletons wrapped in hard ropes of muscle and clothed in rubbery skin, no longer human, no longer sane, and always hungry.

Ryan shot forward, his arms opened wide. The vampire eyes dimmed. His face shook with strain. He was trying to hold them and his hold was slipping.

“Retreat!” I barked.

The shapeshifters on both sides of me streamed to the back door, all except for two renders. A thud announced the door flying off its hinges as someone kicked it free.

Hugh spun around and hammered a punch to Ryan’s jaw. The big man’s eyes rolled back into his skull, his face went slack, and he crashed down.

The vampires shot forward like rabid dogs with snapped chains. One—large, female, and recently turned—lunged at Hugh. Five came sailing through the air at us, their eyes bright ravenous red, free of any navigator’s restraint, their minds like open sores, oozing undeath. Five. Too many.

The People fled through the front door. Ghastek stopped, his face twisted.

I grabbed the five vampires with my mind. It was easy. So shockingly easy. The undead went limp in midleap, falling rather than jumping.

Behind the table one of Hugh’s men stepped forward, fit, his hair a short dark stubble, two guns in his hands, and fired point-blank into the female vampire’s face. The bullets tore into the undead, chewing through the dried flesh.

My renders moved as one. Sage on my right yanked a vampire out of the air, before it could even hit the ground, and twisted its head off with her huge monster hand armed with leopard claws. The werewolf to my left disemboweled the second bloodsucker. I pulled the next pair to them.

The female vampire kept pushing forward, against the stream of gunfire. The man kept firing, his carved profile cold. Bright puffs of red mist shot out of the back of the vampire’s head as bullets tore through the brain and muscle. The top of its skull disintegrated. The undead paused, turned slightly, unsteady on its feet, and I saw the wall through the gaping hole where its brain used to be. The vampire took another halting step and sank down, limp, its limbs twitching.

Hugh laughed.

Yeah, yeah, your flunky knows how to squeeze the trigger. Bite me. I pulled the last undead toward the renders. A single person sprinted from behind me to the table. She leaped over the vampire corpses and landed by Mulradin’s body. Desandra. Damn it.

The renders tore into the last vampire.

The man with the guns turned and I saw his face. His stare punched me. Nick. Dear God.

“Desandra!” I snarled.