The beam of Bocage’s flashlight played across the room. In the smoke and the haze of blood, there were easily a dozen dead or damaged vampires, all heaped against the far wall. “It’s good,” Bocage muttered. Then he went down to his man. Des Roches was pale, his face frozen. He was in agony and trying hard to suppress it. Paul was in exactly the same situation.

The question wasn’t whether they could go out and regroup, then do what needed to be done, which was to get back down here to spray these creatures with acid. The question was whether anybody was going to live long enough to get out in the first place.

“Bocage, are we all hurt?”

He shrugged. “I’ll live.” His right leg was sheeted with blood.

“Becky?”

“I’m good.”

“We must get out,” Bocage said. “Des Roches is going into shock.”

Becky was playing her light across the broken mass of vampires. “Eight,” she said. “That’s a total of seventeen in this action.”

“We killed a conclave,” Paul said. “Half of Europe, maybe.”

“The Germans are doing the same in Berlin,” Bocage said.

“The Germans! Why don’t we Americans get told anything any-more?” Paul asked.

“You have Echelon,” Bocage replied. “It’s supposed to put the rest of us in a fishbowl.”

“Apparently it doesn’t.”

Bocage smiled a careful smile. “No, it doesn’t.”

Paul was beginning to feel the shuddering cold that came with shock. He took deep breaths, trying to stave it off.

Becky went over to the vampires. “Bocage,” she said, “we need to blow their heads off. In case we can’t come back and sterilize.”

They rounded up his lost clips, and Bocage and Becky went among them, blasting first one and then the next. Paul wondered what it would be like with a woman who could do that.

The knife was beginning to hurt a great deal. A wound that penetrated a bone into its marrow, which this one certainly did, was exceptionally painful. On his side he had the fact that he was an exceptionally fast healer. But that came later. Now, there was only the pain and danger of the wound.

“We’ve gotta get moving,” he said.

The little band of them ascended slowly, everybody trying to keep their suffering from everybody else.

Despite the waves of searing pain that swept his whole body every time he took a step, Paul felt like laughing. The damn queen of the vampires, or the traveler, or whatever she was—was somewhere in that pile of broken bodies. No more perfumed innocence walking the streets.

Between this and what the Germans were doing, Europe was likely to be free of the pest. And the book under his arm would soon free the Americas—if they acted fast enough.