The she returned to the stairs, crooning soft words to the humans, standing between them and the corner where she’d put the body. The light wasn’t that good. Likely, someone who was purely human wouldn’t be able to see that corner well enough to know that the girl’s body wasn’t the only one there. Possibly—because I don’t know exactly what humans see in the dark—even the dead vampire on the wall was beyond what they could sense. I could have been blindfolded and known there were bodies down here by the smell, but humans don’t always pay attention to their noses. And most of the corpses were either done rotting or hadn’t yet gotten a good start on it.

A skinny and worn-looking middle-aged man tentatively started down the stairs. As he did so, the female vampire said, in heavily accented English, “Are you sure this is the best place for them?”

“It will take her a while to look for any of us down here,” said the voice of the man who’d translated for me earlier. Kocourek. I couldn’t see him; he was still at the top of the stairs.

“See if you can get them to settle in under the stairs, then put them to sleep,” he continued. “Smells so bad in here, I don’t think she’ll know the difference.”

I had to agree. It was foul here, and the humans didn’t help matters. Hygiene was apparently not something that this seethe valued in their sheep.

“Should we just kill them?” the female asked, her voice shaking with stress, I thought, though her accent made it difficult to tell. She changed the angle of her face, and I realized she was crying.

“It might come to that,” said Kocourek grimly. “Anything would be better—Lars.”

One of the other two vampires stepped over and caught a middle-aged woman who had turned to run back up the stairs. He caught her, stared into her eyes a moment. The terror and tension in her body relaxed.

He said something soft and sweet to her, turned her, and kept his hand on her shoulder as he took up the rear position.

The third vampire sighed.

“Let’s get them as safe as we can, people. Dagmar?”

“Yes,” the first vampire said.

She had a lantern, and she turned it on. It glowed red rather than white. She set it under the stairs, bathing the area in the gentle glow. From my position, I couldn’t see the whole area, but it looked as though the only thing on the dirt floor was dirt—which made it a lot cleaner than most of the rest of the room.

She took those seven people, one at a time, met their eyes, and caught them in her hunter’s magic. But instead of feeding on them, she sent them into the space under the stairs, where they curled up around each other for warmth . . . and slept.

The little man with the mustache, who was the only one whose name I hadn’t heard, crawled in with them to tip one woman’s head so she didn’t snore. He did it with tenderness, and he kissed her cheek. He took the lantern out from under the stairs and left his charges in darkness.