“Then we got the sonuvabitch!” Charlie said, his smile widening. “It’s over, at least the first part. The rest of ’em won’t be too hard to deal with, right? Right?” He noticed the other’s cynical expression and it sobered him. His smile slid off his face. “Uh oh. What now?!”

Stiles was staring at the ruined building. It was hard to tell with his face so bruised and battered and smudged with paint, but his brow was knitted and his swollen jaw looked set in concentration. He looked as if he smelled—or sensed—something bad. “He isn’t dead,” he said. “Not yet. I can still feel him.”

“Feel him? What’s this shit?”

“You probably won’t believe this, but we’ve got some kind of empathy going here, me and him—don’t ask me how or why. But I can feel that bastard. That’s how I tracked him as fast as I did.”

“Empathy?” Bean repeated, considering the word. He finally shrugged. “Hell, why not? After vampires, things tend to go down pretty easy. Now, this empathy . . . does it mean he can feel you too?”

Stiles shrugged. “I think so. When I let him. It’s an old trick we learned in ’Nam. Some of the boys thought that Charlie—the Vietcong—could sense your fear, home in on it. It might sound stupid now, but it didn’t out there in the bush. So we found a way to fix him. We called it shutting down. No extraneous thought, no emotion. Just put a lid on everything. I don’t think Danner can see through it. At least he was surprised when I showed up.” He took a few steps toward the rubble. “I swear, Charlie, I can feel him. That bastard isn’t dead yet.”

Bean looked at the man before him and saw a lull in his defenses, an instant when his facade slipped. He saw inside to the rage that drove him, and the pain as well, enough to force a man to his knees. And he could finally reconcile the image that tonight’s battle had instilled in his mind: Stiles was no superman as he’d appeared earlier. He had simply kept his injuries bottled up all evening, by sheer force of will, and that in itself was somehow even more astounding. The pain was in there, roiling, waiting to take control again. But the merest flash of it and the defensive wall immediately went back up. Stiles blinked, and the blank look returned. He was shut down. He was safe again. He motioned to the deputy. “C’mon. Let’s take a look.”