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  The leech bypassed the easier target of the pretty blond nurse bending over his bed and grabbed for Michael, dragging him down by the v-neck of his pale green rumpled scrubs.

  To give him credit, the doctor resisted. I saw the muscles in his broad back strain and bunch under the suddenly tight fabric and one of the seams actually started to rip as he tried to pull away. But the strongest human still isn’t a tenth as powerful as the weakest vamp.

  It was no contest.

  By the time I’d fumbled my silver stiletto from inside my left boot, the leech had already sunk fangs into the meaty part of Michael’s neck—right where the shoulder and throat meet.

  Like I said—he was dead right in front of me, or as good as, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.

  But I tried anyway.

  I ran forward and planted my knife in the vamp’s right eye. I pushed hard, feeling the same resistance you get when you slice semi-soft cheese, until I heard the dull scraping of the stiletto’s point meeting the inside of the skull.

  That wouldn’t kill an older vamp, not even a leech—but it would sure as hell slow him down.

  The leech let go of Michael Moran and started thrashing again—this time I knew his convulsions were real. I dug a vial of holy water out of my other boot, flipped open the cap, and poured it down the bloody-fanged throat that was open wide in a silent scream.

  The leech began smoking and jittering like a broken toy and a few drops of the liquid landed on the doctor’s wounded neck. They skated across his skin and started to hiss and sizzle like water on a hot skillet. I knew what that meant—he wasn’t going to die of the bite.

  He was going to turn.

  I knew I ought to kill him then and there. It would save me the trouble of hunting him down later and taking him out after he already had several kills of his own under his belt. But the only good knife I had with me was still planted hilt deep in the leech’s brain and besides, my arm still tingled where he had touched me.

  It was stupid and sentimental and foolish—all the things Uncle Harry had trained me never to be—but I still couldn’t bring myself to kill him. Not right there, anyway.

  So instead of twisting his head until his neck broke like I should have, I grabbed his muscular arm. Ignoring the commotion all around me, I started dragging him towards the sliding glass doors of the ER exit.

  “What are you doing? Where are we going?” Doctor Moran sounded dazed but he followed me docilely enough.

  “Out,” I said. “Away.”

  The security guards were just beginning to look around and realize that what they probably thought was a murder had been committed when the glass doors opened with a whoosh.

  Knowing it was a stupid decision didn’t stop me.

  I dragged Michael Moran, the nicely rumpled doctor out of his comfortable world and into the night, changing both our lives forever.

  Chapter Two

  I folded his big frame into my black Charger with some difficulty. It’s an older car but it has a lot of muscle under the hood which I sometimes need. I didn’t bother with a seatbelt. If he was changing into a vamp, and I knew he was, a trip through the windshield wouldn’t hurt him a bit if we got in a wreck. I fastened my own seatbelt securely and fumbled with the keys.

  Damn lydocaine—when was it going to wear off?

  Streetlights flashed past in orderly procession as I wondered what the hell I was doing and why I was doing it. Michael Moran was nothing but a liability to me. There was no way I ought to let the brief moment of connection we’d shared get in my way when it came to disposing of him. And yet instead of pulling into a convenient side ally and finishing him off, I kept on driving. Was I actually considering taking him home with me?

  How stupid was that?

  It wasn’t just a sappy sentimental wish for true love that let me spare his life—what little was left of it. That’s what I told myself, anyway. But there was something funny going on here and I wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  What had the leech been doing in the ER in the first place? And why had he grabbed for Michael over the pretty blond nurse that had been leaning right over him, in the line of fire, so to speak? None of it felt like an accident.

  Something wasn’t right.

  He was already starting to fade as we pulled into my garage. I live in a modest two-story ranch with plenty of room between me and my neighbors and I don’t get too friendly with the people in the neighborhood. It pisses them off when I don’t say hi and they never invite me to their block parties and backyard barbeques anymore but it’s for their own good. Anybody around me is a potential target for vamps.

  It’s better to just keep to myself.

  I closed the garage door and practically had to drag Michael out of the car and into the house. He was going into what vamps call ‘the deep sleep’ and I call ‘a golden opportunity.’

  When a person is first bitten, if they don’t die outright, their body undergoes a metamorphosis from human to vamp. The heart shuts down and the blood stops pumping through their veins as the virus takes hold.

  They no longer need to breathe unless they really want to—many autonomic functions become voluntary—which was how the leech in the ER had managed to stop his heartbeat and drop his blood pressure. They develop superhuman strength and a fierce thirst for blood since the virus feeds on the hemoglobin carried by red blood cells and their own body isn’t producing it anymore.

  The full change from human to vamp takes about two hours and in that time, the fledgling vamp is completely vulnerable. Like a moth inside its cocoon, you can crush it with no muss, fuss, or trouble. Of course, once the moth emerges from it shell, you may have a hard time catching it.

  Likewise a new vamp fully awake to the night is a fearsome sight, even for an experienced slayer like me. Later you might be able to talk to them—if you wanted to, which I don’t. But at their awakening to darkness, they have only one thing on their minds—blood and plenty of it. Eating machines, just like the great white shark which has no natural predator.

  Except vampires do have a predator—me.

  So why was I helping one into my house—letting him cross the unseen barrier that exists in all private residences? A vampire can’t cross your threshold unless you invite him inside—don’t ask me why. My boss and mentor, a man I knew only as ‘The Monsignor,’ claimed it was because vampires have no souls, so they can’t enter the residence of those who do, without their express permission.

  Personally, I thought it probably had something to do with the virus—maybe it caused a mild form of OCD that made them unable to come in unless you asked.

  But for whatever reason, you have to be damn careful letting a vamp come into your house. That’s because with vampires, you have what I call ‘the domino effect.’ Which simply means that if you invite one vamp into your house, you invite every vamp he personally has ever infected with the virus. Kind of like that old saw they tell you in high school, about how if you sleep with a guy you’re automatically sleeping with everyone else he’s ever slept with.

  Only in this case it’s a lot more likely to get you killed.

  Of course, the domino effect can work for you too. If you kill a vamp, you automatically ash every one of his direct descendants. That explains why I only go after the Elders—assassinate them, and the entire family dies because they’re the top domino—the first link in the chain. The captains and lieutenants and leeches under them aren’t worth my time.

  Unfortunately, Elders are closely guarded and hard to get to and once you do get to them, they’re pretty damn hard to kill. Which is just another reason to kill as many vamps off as you can while they’re still in the deep sleep and most vulnerable.

  Which was exactly what I wasn’t doing.

  I climbed the steps to my spare bedroom, pulling Michael with me. He had his arm thrown over my shoulder and he was almost dead to the world by now—in more ways than one. He could barely put one foot in front of the other.

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