Then he was deaf, as you always were deaf after that blast. When he could hear again, there was a high noise, the most terrible of noises, shaking the walls, echoing as it pealed again and again through the limestone chambers, the screaming of a woman in molten agony.

Now he used his light. It appeared, a female vampire, with beaded hair and a long dress on, dark blue silk, white collar, and the mouth fully open, a broad O filled with teeth. They had awful mouths, filthy and stinking of the blood in their guts, mouths that were made for sucking. They looked okay—a little thin-lipped was all—until they opened those wet, stinking maws of theirs. If you kissed a vampire, he thought, it might suck your insides right out of you.

The agony of grief was great for them, greater even than for a human being, as he had seen in Asia. She came maddened by it, her arms straight out ahead of her, her fingers long, lethal claws. He knew that she wanted to tear him to pieces. He knew that she wanted to feel his gristle break.

He pulled the trigger. In the flash, he saw her dress billow as if lifted by a funhouse blast. Her face folded in on itself, and her cry joined the cry of the gun and was gone.

Her body hit the wall behind her with a slapping thud, and she slid down a slide of her own thick, black blood.

They lay side by side, and he was amazed at what he saw. The male wore slacks and a black sweater, and a leather jacket so supple that Paul hardly dared touch it. The female beside him was equally passable.

These European vampires were not like the Asians, things that moved only in the shadows. These things could go anywhere they pleased, any time they pleased. But how modern were they? Was there anything to prevent them from getting on the phone, calling their friends in the States?

Of course there wasn’t. Paul had to admit to himself that he’d been lucky in Asia. But that level of surprise was over now. The only thing he had on his side was speed.

Every single creature in this hole had to be killed, and it had to be done right now, today. Otherwise, there were going to be phone calls, God knew, maybe even e-mails, to vampires in America, in Africa—wherever they were as modern and technologically capable as he had to assume these creatures were.

Either he and his cohorts cleared the place out immediately or they lost any and all chance of surprising others.

A long shape like a gigantic spider came striding toward him from along the corridor, its shadow briefly visible in his light. He turned it out.