He prepared to make a grab for her. He didn’t know what he’d do next. All he knew was this: he was in the worst situation he’d ever been in, and he had to do whatever he could to get out of it.

She tossed back the sheet, barely glancing at his nakedness. She drew back the dressing that covered the left half of his chest.

As she gazed at the wound, a sound came through the open door. Somebody out there was screaming, and horribly. Even as he lay here, somewhere else in the house, the vampires were killing.

His speed was not up to its usual standard, but he managed to grab Sarah’s arm. Bandages flew from her hand as he yanked her to him.

He found himself staring down the barrel of his own damn pistol.

“God damn you,” he said.

“God damn you! If it wasn’t for her, you’d be dead, you vicious bastard!”

She reached up to his IV, opened the cock. His attention wandered. She seemed to sway, then to float above him like a madonna ascending to heaven.

The screams rose and fell like a terrible wind in a winter tree. Sarah Roberts’s eyes bored into him—cold, indifferent, murderous. Despite his pounding, relentless hate, his anguished hunger to rise from the bed, knock that gun aside, and physically rip her head from her body, he sank into sleep. The awful screams wove themselves into a dark and nameless nightmare that the drugs in the IV soon transformed into an empty, aimless void.

Miriam held Leo’s wrist and would not let go, not even as the slow, dry hand came and closed around her fingers. Leo felt the strange, dry strength of the corpse; she saw the spark of life in the withered eyes.

She couldn’t look at it. She couldn’t bear it’s touch. But she also couldn’t understand what this awful place was, and above all, what was the matter here.

“Open your eyes!” Miriam said. “Look at it!”

“I am! But what—why—”

“You stupid little cow—didn’t you think there’d be something—some price to pay?”

“Make it let me go! Let me go!”

Miriam dragged her away from John’s coffin. His clinging fingers caused the corpse to rise up, then, as its grip failed, to fall back with a dusty thud. Miriam slammed the lid.

“But he’s not dead! We have to help him!”

“How compassionate you are.” She marched her over to Sarah’s coffin. “This is where your friend came from.”

“What friend?”

“Sarah. That dreary zombie.”

“Zombie?”

“After I blooded her, she cut her own wrists. But she’s clever. She left me the knowledge I needed to bring her back.” She gazed toward John Blaylock’s coffin. “Too bad it was too late for him.”

“But they—I don’t get it!”