He fell backward through the door, crashing to the floor with the boy holding fast, tethered to his throat, sitting astride his chest. Then the pulling began. The drawing out. The sucking. The draining.

Mark tried to speak, tried to scream, but the words clotted in his throat and he choked on them. He was paralyzed. Something in his pulse changed—was interrupted—and he couldn’t utter a sound.

The boy’s chest pressed against his, and he could feel the faint thumping of its heart—or something—against his own. As the blood rushed out of Mark’s body, he felt the boy’s rhythm accelerate and become stronger—thump-thump-thump—reaching a frenzied, intimate gallop that was close to pleasure.

The boy’s stinger engorged as he fed, and the whites of his eyes, as he stared at Mark, flushed crimson. Methodically, the boy kept twining his crooked, bony fingers through Mark’s hair. Tightening his grip on his prey…

The others burst through the door, setting upon the victim, tearing at his clothes. As their stingers pierced his flesh, Mark felt a renewed pressure change inside his body, not decompression but compression. Vacuum collapse, like a juice pack being consumed.

And at the same time, a scent overpowered him, rising into his nose and eyes like a cloud of ammonia. He felt an eruption of wetness over his chest, warm, like freshly made soup, and his hands gripping the little fiend’s body felt a sudden, hot dampness. The boy had soiled himself, defecating over Mark as he fed—though the excretion seemed more chemical than human.

Pain like a motherfucker. Corporeal, all over, his fingertips, his chest, his brain. The pressure went away from his throat, and Mark hung there like a bright white star of effulgent pain.

Neeva pushed open the bedroom door just a sliver, to see that the children were finally asleep. Keene and Audrey Luss lay in sleeping bags on the floor next to her own granddaughter Narushta’s bed. The Luss children were all right most of the time—Neeva, after all, had been their sole daytime caretaker since Keene was four months old—but they had both cried tonight. They missed their beds. They wanted to know when they could go home, when Neeva would take them back. Sebastiane, Neeva’s daughter, was constantly asking how long until the police came and knocked down their door. But it was not the police coming for them that concerned Neeva.