The Fall

Gus intervened quickly, finishing her with a hard swipe of his sword that scored the surface of the road, scraping up sparks.

This slaying sent the other vamps into an attack frenzy. A brutal battle, Gus and the Sapphires outnumbered at first three to one, then four to one as vamps fled from the pawnshop and emerged from the basements of the adjacent buildings burning along the street. Either they had been psychically summoned into battle, or simply heard the ringing dinner bell. Destroy one, and two more came at you.

Then a shotgun blast exploded near Gus and a marauding vamp was cut in two. He turned to see Mr. Quinlan, the Ancients’ chief hunter, picking off rioting white-bloods with military precision. He must have come up from underneath like these others. Unless he had been shadowing Gus and the Sapphires the entire time, from the darkness of the underground.

Gus noticed, in that moment-his senses heightened by the adrenaline of battle-that no blood worms coursed beneath the surface of Quinlan’s translucent skin. All the old ones, including the other hunters, crawled with worms, and yet his nearly iridescent flesh was as still and smooth as skin on a pudding.

But the fight was on, and the revelation passed in an instant. Mr. Quinlan’s killing cleared some much-needed space, and the Sapphires, no longer in danger of being surrounded, moved the fight from the middle of the street toward the pawnshop. The children waited, on all fours, on the periphery of the battle, like wolf cubs awaiting a weakened deer to kill. Quinlan sent one blast in their direction, the blind creatures scattering with a high-pitched squeal as he reloaded.

Angel snapped a vampire’s neck with a sharp twist of his hands, and then, in a single, swift move, rare for a man his age-and girth-he turned and used his massive elbow to crack the skull of another one against the wall.

Gus saw his chance, and broke away from the melee, running inside with his sword in search of the old man. The shop was empty, so he ran up the stairs, into an old, prewar apartment.

The many mirrors told him he was in the right place-but no old man.

He met two female vamps on the way back down, introducing them to the heel of his boot before running them through with silver. Their shrieks adrenalized him as he jumped over their bodies, avoiding the white blood oozing down the steps.

The stairs continued belowground, but he had to return to his compadres fighting for their lives and their souls beneath the smoke-blotted sky.

Before exiting, he noticed a section of busted wall near the stairs, exposing old copper water pipes running vertically. He set his sword down on a display case of brooches and cameos, finding a Chuck Knoblauch-autographed Louisville Slugger baseball bat with a $39.99 price tag. He hacked away at the old wallboard, smashing it open until he located the gas line. An old cast-iron pipe. Three good hacks with the bat, and it separated at a coupling-fortunately, without producing any sparks.

The smell of natural gas filled the room, escaping from the ruptured pipe not with a cool hiss but with a hoarse roar.

The feelers swarmed around Bolivar, who felt their distress. This fighter with the shotgun. He was not human. He was vampire.

But he was different.

The feelers could not read him. Even if he were of a different clan-and, clearly, he was-they should have been able to impart some knowledge of him to Bolivar, so long as he was of the worm.

Bolivar was mystified by this strange presence, and made to attack. But the feelers, reading his intent, leaped into his path. He tried to pull them off, but their dogged insistence was strange enough to merit his attention.

Something was about to happen, and he needed to take heed.

Gus reclaimed his sword and slashed his way out through another vamp-this one dressed in doctor’s scrubs-on his way outside and into the next building. There, he ripped away a burning section of windowsill, running with the flaming plank back into battle. He drove it, sharp point-down, into the back of a slain vamp, so that the wood stood like a torch.

“Creem!” he called, needing the silver-blinged killer to cover him as he went into the gear bag for the crossbow. He rummaged for a silver bolt, finding one. Gus tore off a piece of the downed vamp’s shirt, wrapping it around the bolt head and tying it tight, then loading the bolt into the cross, dipping the wrapping into the flames, and raising the crossbow toward the store.

A vamp wearing bloody gym clothes came wilding at Gus, and Quinlan stopped the creature with a crushing punch to the throat. Gus advanced to the curb, hollering, “Get back, cabrones!” then aiming and letting the flaming bolt go, watching it drive through the smashed window frame and across the shop, landing in the rear wall.