Stiles tried to bring the gun up but Larson knocked it spinning away and went for the throat, clawing and catching Stiles’s shirt and pulling him into a bear hug. Stiles went with the momentum instead of fighting it and drove his head straight into the vampire’s mouth. It bought him a second or two of surprise, just enough time to slip Larson’s grip and to lock one of those meaty arms behind him. Then, with a bit of leverage and a handful of hair, he spun the marshal completely around and drove his face into the fender of the patrol car, again and again.

Larson shoved him away and shook his head to clear it, then laughed. “That the best you can do, boy?” he taunted, despite his own physical condition. Stiles’s defense had pulped a cheekbone and spread out his nose like a pad of butter, but those were the least of his injuries. A point-blank shotgun blast had left a cavity in his chest big enough to stick a cat through, and the fall had rendered his balding head even balder, this time clear to the bone. Hitting the light bar atop the cruiser had sheared off most of his scalp; it now hung in his face like a displaced toupee, connected only by a few strands of flesh. His shirt was tented by jutting rib bones and soaked with blood from some previous victim.

Charlie? Stiles glanced at the window upstairs with dread.

“What’s wrong, boy?” Larson said, stalking him. “You don’t look like you feel too good. C’mon.” He yawned like a bear trap and oily spittle ran down his chin. “I’ll make it quick, I swear. C’mere.”

Stiles made a lunge for the van but Larson anticipated it and scrambled into his path, arms outstretched. In reflex the soldier jumped into the air, spun and buried a heel in the marshal’s mouth. But the move sent a flash of pain through his own body, straight from groin to brain, and it stole his balance. He came down on his pivot leg that now wobbled like rubber, and he collapsed, his vision blurred, his mind swimming. All he could see was Larson’s leering face coming at him again, spitting teeth along the way but retaining the two important ones. “Good try, boy,” he smirked, “but no ci-gar.”

Then Dutch flinched. He backed up a step, looking about perplexed, and then he flinched again as if stung by a wasp and he rubbed at his eye. The red dot that appeared on the back of his hand was comparatively weak as lasers go but still strong enough to burn the optic nerve. Larson turned his half-blind eye on Billie, standing a few feet away with Stiles’s carbine at her shoulder. “Stay back, Dutch,” she warned, “or so help me God, I’ll kill you.”