Five . . .

The beast lunged at me. I dodged left. Wicked teeth snapped half an inch from my arm and I stabbed Slayer into the creature’s pale side. My enchanted blade ripped through flesh and sinew. Dark rust-colored blood spilled out from the wound and washed over the beast’s gray side.

To the left, Derek yanked a tarasque out of the air, flipped it on its back, and chopped its throat with his axe. To the right Ascanio spun in place, slicing at the beasts, his swords spinning in a familiar horizontal figure eight pattern . . . He was trying to use my butterfly technique. It was not awful. His feet were off, and he was leaning forward too much, but it wasn’t awful. I had no idea where he’d learned it.

If we lived through this little adventure from hell, I’d have to correct his form before it was too late.

A familiar sickening magic washed over my mind. Just what we needed. “Vampires. Incoming.”

The tarasque lunged at me and I sliced across its nose.

“How many?” Robert asked.

My tarasque screamed and fled.

“Two. They’re heading this way, fast.”

We had to finish the fight now. If we bled, it would be all over. A vampire was like a shark—a single drop of human blood would pull it from a mile away like a magnet.

The second beast attacked me from the right. I slashed the side of its throat. It crashed down and I stabbed Slayer into its left top eye socket.

Desandra spat some word I didn’t understand. A pale body flew above us through the air, crashed against a glass iceberg with a sickening crunch, slid down, and lay still, its six legs limp. Wow. Behind me a wet hacking noise announced someone cleaving through flesh.

The two revolting sparks of undead minds drew closer.

“A thousand feet,” I whispered. “Coming on the left. They’ll see us.”

A tarasque the size of a horse shot out of the darkness and leaped at us, six legs in the air. I stepped aside. That’s the problem with jumping. Once you went airborne, there wasn’t much you could do about changing where you landed. The beast fell right between us. I lunged on top of it and sank my sword between its ribs. The claws raked my steel-toed boot, ripping through duct tape and gouging the reinforced leather.

Derek cleaved the beast’s skull with his tomahawk, grabbed the twitching body, and hurled it to my right, into the shadows. Desandra grabbed another and threw it into the dark. Bodies flew around me. A moment and all corpses were gone.

“Five hundred feet,” I whispered.

Robert turned. A streak of red slid down his fingers from a small cut on his hand. Shit.

The vamps accelerated.

He stuck his fingers in his mouth. The cut on his hand knitted closed—Lyc-V scrambling to make repairs.