Armand stood right before him. Garekyn held Eleni’s helpless body by the waist. And slowly, lapping the blood from his cupped right hand, Garekyn let Armand take her away. Gently, Armand laid her body on the floor.

“Get out of here,” Armand whispered. He appeared unable to move, staring at Garekyn even as his eyelids descended, even as his eyes appeared to close. Then the creature appeared to shake himself all over, and his eyes fixed on Garekyn again.

Garekyn couldn’t reason. He had no will. Sluggishly he backed up and gazed on the ruin of the room—the shattered marble, the stupid steel cable coils tangled in the weak iron table frame that had supported the marble. And then he spied something that quickened his pulse. His leather wallet lying there on a wooden table against the back wall opposite the door. His keys. His passport, his phone, his things.

He cleaned all the blood clumsily from his hand with his tongue and, in an instant, he’d scooped up these personal items of his, these indispensable personal things, and he was moving out the door.

Benji Mahmoud cowered against the wall, speaking a stream of frantic words into his little phone. It was Garekyn’s full name he was saying over and over, Garekyn’s description he was repeating, Garekyn’s address in London!

Every instinct told Garekyn to get away as fast as he could. But he turned back once.

Armand held the broken, helpless Eleni to his chest, his left wrist pressed to her mouth. She was moving her mouth. She was sucking his blood. The creature was doing all he could to restore the damaged Eleni, the poor broken Eleni, and he made no move to stop Garekyn.

And neither did the helpless Benji, who sat asleep against the wall now, his head bowed, his cell phone beside his right hand on the concrete floor.

Garekyn rushed towards the staircase.

As he came up into the empty house above he understood why the monsters hadn’t tried to stop him. The pale white morning light filled the first floor of the townhouse. It made the glass in the front door look like ice. The sun was rising over the city of Manhattan.

The creatures couldn’t come after him. It was true, their vampire lore. They were powerless when the sun rose, and that’s why Benji had dropped down unconscious against the wall and Armand had used his last few precious moments to heal Eleni.

He could go back now. He would have them at his mercy! He could examine them ever more closely! He might batter them to pulp with the fragments of the broken marble slab.

But a sudden banging noise sent a shudder through the building. The great heavy door below had been slammed back into its metal frame sealing the basement chamber off from the outside world.

Garekyn fled.