The vampiric magic that bound Guccio to his half life didn’t give up easily. Guccio wasn’t dead; he swayed on his feet with a confused expression on his face. Apparently his high-velocity lobotomy had degraded his thinking skills because he just stood there. The raw tissue writhed and pulsed in the open wound as the vampire’s body struggled to repair the damage.

“A gun?” said Bonarata quietly.

“Why didn’t you shoot him earlier?” asked Marsilia. “You had time to do it after you sent Iacopo to me.”

“Because,” Adam said, “I needed Bonarata to know that I can defend my territory from vampires without any help at all. Guccio is one of your strongest vampires. He attacked me armed with a dagger—and I could have defeated him with a stack of plates.” He put two more rounds into Guccio, this time between his eyes.

Guccio dropped bonelessly to the floor, faceup. There were three neat holes and only a little blood from the gunshots. The real damage was hidden from sight. He had been a pretty man, but his features were only visible for a moment.

Dead vampires as old as Guccio dry up and turn to ash pretty quickly.

“The gun just makes things quicker.” Satisfied Guccio was permanently dead, Adam looked at Marsilia. “But if I’d used the gun right at the beginning, there would have been one less casualty.” He looked at Bonarata. “In my territory, I’d have used the gun.”

“Why was he fighting so hard?” asked Larry. “He acted like he actually had a chance. Once Adam saw to it that the assassination did not take place, Guccio was ended. Even if he had taken Adam out, his element of surprise was gone. You wouldn’t have let him live.”

Bonarata looked around the mostly empty room and sighed. Besides Adam’s people, there were five or six vampires.

“My people,” Bonarata said. “How many of you were obligated to follow Guccio while he was alive?”

All of them raised their hands.

“Raising new children is troublesome,” Bonarata said. “You all understand how it works? You collect sheep and tend them. And in a few years, five or six on average, if you are careful, you will have one prepared who can become your child. For that one, you will have tended a dozen who, for one reason or another, will never live to become vampires. Once you have changed your fledgling, for years afterward, sometimes decades and sometimes centuries, you still have to feed them and make sure that they are not misbehaving. Eventually, you hope, they will go out on their own and be able to produce their own children.”

“I am Bonarata’s child,” said Marsilia. “And I know a few others, but there are only a few of us.” She gave Bonarata a quick, affectionate smile. “He is too lazy to tend children.”

It must have been an old joke because he smiled back. “We vampires are selfish creatures.”

Marsilia completed it by saying, “It is the only reason vampires haven’t taken over the world.”