The eyes of any other would have seen the hand and merely from its shape expected motion, but not Stiles. At dusk he’d returned with his van and, after reconnoitering the area, had pried the bodies from the concrete tube. He didn’t actually expect to find their killer hiding in there among them, but it had been worth a try and it did give him a chance to examine the bodies. Seeing Larry Hovi’s deflated beach ball of a corpse up close, with sagging, sallow flesh the texture of butcher paper and a broadly laughing throat, was enough to strike from Stiles’s mind any residue of lingering humanity. This was no longer a body, an arm, a hand. It was a cold thing, inanimate and unfeeling, and a sane man would no more expect movement from it than he would a T-bone in the Kroger meat display. That’s what made the wait all the more unnerving—waiting for something to happen that shouldn’t be happening at all.

He sat back with a sigh of exasperation and caught himself trying to light a pretzel stick with the dashboard lighter. The tremors were slight but there nonetheless. So that’s it. Damn smokes’ve got a better grip on you than you thought. He kept his hands up and concentrated until the withdrawals subsided and the trembling eased. That’s it, once and for all. You stop this time and you don’t start again.

He smiled to himself and took a long deep drag on a pretzel stick. Yeah, that’s what you always say.

He sat there for what seemed an hour instead of the fifteen minutes it actually was and tried to make some sense of what had happened. In less than twenty-four hours a fairly routine search-and-destroy had become a total fucking nightmare. The result? Dead civilians. What went wrong? What the fuck went wrong?

The little voice in the back of his head answered. You did, asshole. You went wrong. You made the one fatal mistake that any cherry recruit worth his juice would’ve avoided. You underestimated the enemy.

It had to be Danner. He’d killed the boys—the clues were too obvious. Another vampire would simply have bitten their throats, not ripped them out with his nails. Only a fiend hampered by a pulpy, fangless mouth would have gone to the trouble of opening his victims like pop-top cans. But how? How does a blind, faceless vampire find his prey, much less kill it? And how does he scale walls with a shot-up kneecap that wouldn’t even support his skeletal weight? Unless . . . He slapped the wheel. C’mon, Stiles. Goddammit, we’ve been over this. For the last time, no changing into bats or rats or wolves or fog. They never have in the past and they don’t now. A person cannot change shape, living or dead.