Before they could move, the doors burst open and a woman, naked but for a torn scrap of a bra, lunged across the threshold. Bite marks marred every inch of her skin. Her lips were blue, her limbs mottled. These were her dying struggles.

Mouse stiffened at his side, her eyes wide with horror. The woman reached for them, her face twisting in a rictus of pain as she crashed to the floor. From the shadows between the sanctuary doors, the Fangs glared at them.

“They can’t come out here,” Cyrus reminded Mouse, grabbing her hand and pulling her toward the basement door. He hoped they hadn’t found a way to circumvent that law of vampire physiology. If they had, he and Mouse were truly doomed.

A gaunt vampire with hollow eyes and thick stubble on his jaw grabbed the nearly dead woman’s ankle and tugged. She raised her head, turning wide, tear-filled eyes upward. Her cracked lips formed a single, soundless “Please,” and she dug her fingers into the carpet as the Fang pulled her, screaming, back into the sanctuary.

“Get back downstairs!” another vampire growled at them. Then the doors slammed shut and they were left alone.

“Wh-what—” Mouse stammered, then sagged against Cyrus. She was fainting, he realized, and he was still not strong enough to hold up her weight. He tried for the basement door, but they slipped to the carpet, falling where the dead woman had landed in her ill-fated escape attempt. He glanced at the carpet. Fingernails. They had ripped from her hands, tangled in the fibers as she’d tried desperately to keep the Fangs from pulling her back.

Mouse raised her head, and her gasp told him she saw them, as well. “Were you…When you were…”

“No.” Cyrus couldn’t look at her, at her horrified face. “No, I was much worse. They looked up to me, even if it affords me no currency with them now.”

She pulled away, trembling. “We should go downstairs. Eventually, the sun will go down, and they’ll be angry.”

Sunlight or not, they were doomed anyway, Cyrus realized as they returned to their basement prison. The Fangs showed a horrible sense of invention, holding them here. Of course they would choose a place like this, where the climate would confine their captives during the daylight, when they themselves were most vulnerable.

Cyrus and Mouse were well and truly trapped. The danger of the situation, which had until now seemed a trivial annoyance, finally dawned on him. Mouse, the flimsy life raft he’d been clinging to, might not live through this. The thought was unfathomable. He, who’d killed with such sadistic pleasure in the past, would be spared out of necessity. Because his father willed it. But she, who’d retained her purity, body and soul, would die as a victim of circumstance.