The giant clenched his fists, his enormous arms bent at the elbows, and he roared at the sky. A blast of heat rolled at us. Something shiny sparked at Lago’s throat. I squinted. An earring. He had pierced the skin below his clavicle with it, probably to conceal it. The earring must’ve required blood contact. Lago, you fool. You stupid, stupid fool. Now he would die. There was no way to save him. Such a waste.

“You promised,” Julie said next to me in a small voice.

“Settle down. I’m not going to fight him.”

Ghastek’s voice rolled through the Mole Hole. “All teams, take him down.”

•   •   •

I CROSSED MY arms. “It’s been fifteen minutes.”

“Sixteen,” one of my vampire babysitters said in a female voice. “Ma’am.”

That didn’t exactly make things better.

The question of whether the host’s body affected the giant’s power had been answered. Lago had survived nine years as a merc. He was damn fast. The vampires sliced at him, but he caught them, broke them, and tossed them aside. They regenerated, and he broke them again.

Glossy metal scales had begun to form on his legs, slowly climbing their way up. They were midway up his thighs now.

Something fell off the giant and lay in a heap. It looked like a human-sized pale maggot. I squinted at it. It was a vampire. Normally gaunt, it had swollen to ridiculous proportions, as if someone somehow had gotten the Michelin man from the old commercials and turned him into an undead monstrosity. As if the vampires weren’t already revolting enough.

The vampire next to me opened its mouth. “Strike Leader, we have a one-twenty-eight in progress. Permission to retrieve?”

“Permission granted.”

The vampire sprinted across the glass crater toward the undead maggot thing.

“What’s wrong with it?” Julie asked.

“Too much blood,” one of the navigators said through another bloodsucker. “It’s an almost never-seen phenomenon, but it’s been observed in a controlled study in a lab environment. It takes an average of forty-eight liters of blood consumed in a continuous stream, or the blood of roughly 1.28 Holstein cows, to induce this state in a vampire.”

The giant had too much blood and he was regenerating. They couldn’t drain him fast enough. I couldn’t use a power word on him, but I could do something.

The vampire that left us picked up the bloated undead, slung it over its back, raced back across the glass, and dumped the abomination beside us. The vampire’s eyes had turned dull.

“Ew.” Julie shuddered. “Ew.”

“Ew” didn’t even begin to cover it. Its skin looked ready to rupture. “Why is nobody piloting it?”

“It won’t be able to move for another hour,” the male navigator explained.

“Please relay a message to Ghastek for me,” I said. “Your way isn’t working. Let me help.”

The vampire dutifully repeated the words.