I was comfortable that the vampire I’d scythed was dead. The eyes staring at me were blank and fogged. I didn’t know her well enough to know if I should have been as scared of her as I was of Wulfe, so I assumed not.

While beheading the vampire had only taken seconds, the fight had gone on without us. I didn’t think anyone had noticed what I’d done—the vampire hadn’t made much noise, and the other combatants were fully engaged in their own battles. Moving fast requires a lot of focus. It takes a Charles or an Adam to pay attention to anything more than the fight in front of him.

Jitka had a knife in one hand and something I couldn’t see too well in the other. Maybe it was a screwdriver. The vampire she was fighting had a short sword. Jitka hadn’t been exaggerating her competence. Despite the inequality in weaponry, the battle was not going in the vampire’s favor.

Martin had incapacitated one of his opponents. The big male vampire wasn’t going anywhere with his back broken and his body spasming helplessly under the randomized signals his nervous system sent out.

Short swords must have been the weapon of choice, because Martin had one that he was using to engage the short sword his second vampire opponent had. The wolf must have taken the sword from the disabled vampire, because he hadn’t been carrying it with him on the motorcycle. I’d have noticed.

The vampire jumped back out of the way of Martin’s strike and staggered. I hopped on the top rail of the fence and brought the point of the scythe over his shoulder and into his abdomen. The blade stuck—maybe it caught on a belt buckle. I tried to throw myself backward off the fence to use the weight of my body to force the blade deeper. Had the vampire panicked or frozen, I’d have eviscerated him. But he grabbed the shaft of the scythe, and I had to let go or risk his pulling me somewhere I didn’t want to go. I could not afford to let him get a shot at me.

When I hit the dirt this time, I rolled to my feet and took a quick step back before I figured out that the vampire wasn’t going to be coming after me—or anyone—again. Martin had taken advantage of the vampire’s distraction and used his sword to do what I hadn’t managed. He’d broken the blade doing it, but he’d cut the vampire—pretty messily—in half from belly through collarbone and out the top of the shoulder. The end of the sword had lodged in a rib and broken off. Martin brought the broken blade down on the vampire’s neck and decapitated him.

Jitka’s final opponent went boneless and dropped to the ground, a screwdriver sticking out of one eye. Face grim, the werewolf took the sword the vampire had been using and struck off his head as if she’d worked for years decapitating vampires on an assembly line—the stroke was that precise and emotionless. The dead vampire crumbled to ash in a flash of heat that ate the clothes he was wearing but left the shoes untouched. About that time, the female I’d killed just sort of faded into dust—a lot less dramatic than her comrade.