At least, that’s what I assumed it was doing. It was kind of hard to see, considering that pale tentacles had wrapped around the man’s entire head and neck. But the munching sounds would seem to indicate—

I blinked and stumbled back as something tiny skittered underfoot. It might have been a rat or a roach, but I wasn’t in the mood to take chances. I was in the mood to make it out the damned door. Which I would have—if another flood of mages hadn’t been blocking it as they poured inside, taking the odds from insane to just plain silly.

“Dory! Get out of here!” It took me a second to realize that the vamp had spoken, mainly because I was kind of surprised he was still alive. And even more so when he threw me a gun. “Go!”

I plucked it out of the air. It was a shiny black 9mm Glock 18. Nice.

And then I sprayed bullets—but not at the mages. Because pistol ammo probably wouldn’t get through their body armor and because I wasn’t feeling that charitable right now. If you’re going to be a bitch, might as well be a big bitch, I thought, a little hysterically.

And took out the shelf behind them.

Suddenly, it was like the shooting gallery at the fair if the gun was fully automatic and the ducks never moved. I’m not going to say I broke every bottle, but if there were more than two or three remaining when I finished emptying the clip, I’d be surprised. Bullets ricocheted, jars exploded, bits of flying glass and shrapnel took out other jars, and not-formaldehyde rained down on the mages. Whose faces went saggy, and whose numb hands dropped their weapons, even as they looked around trying to find the source of the barrage. Which they never managed to do, since they rapidly went from confused and pissed off and homicidal to…

Well, whatever emotion can best be described as “lunch.”

The only exceptions were the ones who had been spry enough to dodge back out the door before the fun started. Or the ones who had thrown themselves at the vampire, I guess under the impression that they’d last longer. Or the one who had been in front but who had ducked behind a bunch of crates.

You know, the one I hadn’t seen.

He emerged shrieking a spell that blasted me off my feet and through the air, before slamming me into the wall hard enough to crack bone. Hard enough to liquefy my insides. Hard enough to cause the whole room to bleed—

Red.

I woke in the middle of a battle, which was not unusual.

A human was lunging at me with a knife, attempting to gut me, which was.

I blinked at him.

He was yelling something that I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my ears, which always took a few moments to subside. But the sound bounced off the inside of my skull like rocks. It didn’t hurt, but it was annoying, like an insect buzzing around my ears until I reached out and—

Yes.

That was better.

I peeled myself off the wall and looked around.

It was…colorful. The meaty smell of new blood painted the room in spatters, glowing crimson bright against the darkness. The stench of tainted magic came from a fire eating its way across the floor, flaring along the spectrum as it consumed old potion stains. And a familiar, skin-ruffling musk followed some of the humans, a sickly green that lingered like aftereffects every time one of them moved.

The combined stench was bad, but I had woken in worse, in battlefields days old, full of bloated corpses. No, it was all right.

But something else wasn’t.

Something was wrong.

It wasn’t the strange things running around underfoot. One started for me, then paused, lifting long crablike feelers out in front of it, before abruptly turning and scurrying away. I let it go.

Surprisingly, it also wasn’t the vampire. There was one here, raising every hair on my body from the power he was radiating. First level. Old. Perhaps four hundred years, perhaps more. But the bloodlust was cool in him, his outline merely a vague blue shadow, only the pale mist steaming up from his body and the thin silvered veins under his skin showing any difference between him and the humans.

Satiated or gorged.

Irrelevant.

I let my eyes move on.

The room was cool, too—blues, grays, darkness in corners, one small source of light overhead. My nose twitched, calling it to me, only to be flooded with the ozone taste of electricity. I growled and then ignored it.

But something else gleamed, in brilliant flashes here and there. I walked through the writhing mass of humans toward it. One grabbed my arm; I tossed him against a wall. Another raised a weapon at me—slow, slow, they moved so slowly I could have ripped his throat out before he finished the motion. I settled for taking his rifle away and batting him across the room with it.

I reached the source of the light, but I still couldn’t see it clearly. I growled again, and this time something answered. A strange, haunting cry, and then a hand, bright, bright like flame, emerged from nothingness. And started feeling around the floor.

I cocked my head to the side, nonplussed. I had seen many hands move about on their own, torn or cut off of vampires, or spasming from soon-to-be-dead humans. But they didn’t glow.

Only I glowed.

I growled and grabbed it.

Something gave a shriek, and the hand jerked back. And there was muscle behind it, oh yes there was. Not like the humans, two of whom jumped me a second later and forced me to release the hand in order to crack their skulls together. And by the time I threw them aside and turned back, the hand was gone.

I growled.

Something whimpered.

Something else moved, and I caught a gleam again, like a candle behind a curtain.

I jerked at the fluttering thing and it slithered easily through my fingers. Cloth; waxed. I pulled some more and something on the other side grabbed it and pulled back. But I was stronger, and when I gave a jerk, it came away in my hands.

And the glow flooded the room.

Golden light, like looking into the sun, spilled everywhere, so bright I wanted to shield my eyes. It made it hard to see features—hard to see anything. But features didn’t matter; I normally barely noticed them. Power I did.

I went down on my haunches and reached for it, but something was in the way.

Bars. Iron. New. I could still smell the solder. I pulled them aside and felt around in the box—why was it in a box?—and finally grasped it.

It bit my hand.

“No,” I told it. “Bad.”

And then I snatched it out.

I still couldn’t see it very well; in fact it was harder up close where the light hurt my eyes. But it smelled wrong. I pulled it close and sniffed it, mentally filtering out the stink of blood and urine and peppery fear radiating off it, but for once, scent didn’t help. I pawed at it, checking its limbs. It whimpered again, and the light flickered.

“Hurt?” I demanded, because I couldn’t find any unclosed wounds.

It didn’t reply.

“Hurt!” I said again, louder, because maybe it was deaf. But no. It flinched; it had heard me. And then some gunfire hit the cage, sparking off the bars, and it flinched again. And kept doing it, in little motions that flickered against the canvas like firelight.

Oh. It didn’t like the noise. I stood up and tucked it under an arm. I would take it away from the sounds, and then it would be better.

I scanned the room.

The humans were dead or as good as. The vampire, of course, was not. Injured, but not mortally so, which made it more dangerous. I narrowed my eyes at it. There was a faint tinge of pink around the blue now, blended by the currents of its power into mauve tendrils that smoked up from the surface of its skin.

I kept the small thing close as I skirted the field of bodies. The vampire turned as we did, but made no forward movement. But the currents shivering through its veins increased, as its power surged.

I growled a warning.

The vampire was unhappy; I could feel it in the heat it suddenly gave off, in the way it charged the air with ozone. My nose wrinkled. I hated that smell. How humans lived in cities steeped in the scent of those who hunted them, I would never understand. How could they not know they were stalked, when every house reeked of the hunters? When every streetlight hummed like the stolen energy in their veins, making it almost impossible to tell the difference?

I would take the small thing somewhere with no false lights. With nothing but trees and wind and scurrying things even smaller than it was. With sounds of the earth that would not make it shiver and mewl.

The vampire hadn’t moved.

I eyed it warily. Its power had faded, the silver current barely visible now, but it was only reined in. And its wounds were closing. The only serious one was on its stomach, where some potion had splattered and was eating through the flesh. But the vampire’s healing abilities were faster than the poison’s destructive ones. Soon it would be whole again. And if it fed from the few humans whose pulses still beat faintly, here and there, it would be back to full strength.

If I was going to attack, it should be now.

“Dory?” The vampire spoke, low and soft. The name wasn’t mine, but it was looking at me. The eyes were limned in silver, too, like the veins. They stared at me, deep and empty and awful.

I growled and renewed my grip on the small thing, which was thrashing about. I would kill the vampire if forced, but I was injured, too, and would also need to protect the small one. This was a fight I would avoid if I could.

“Dory—” It held out a hand.

I backed up, jerking the small thing with me. “Mine,” I said, low and guttural, and the vampire started as if surprised.

It probably was. They always assumed that I did not speak. That I could not. So many had plotted my death, discussed it, laughed about it, even while I was in the same room, because they assumed I was mindless. Like one of the failures of their kind, born mad.

But I was not a failure. I was what I was supposed to be. I was dhampir.

And they never lived to tell anyone they were wrong.

“Mine!” I said, challenge in the tone this time. If it wanted a fight, so be it.

But the vampire took several steps back, hands raised. “Oui—yes. Yours,” it agreed. The words meant nothing, because vampires lied, but it also changed color. The pink faded to blue, to gray, to black as it went dim and almost seemed to collapse into itself. Dark and small suddenly, instead of bright with power. I watched it narrowly.