Rose closed her eyes.
Her eyelids lit up, a brief flash that caused her skin to crawl with heat and her nerve endings to burn. Darkness did not return instantly, but faded back again against the painful gray. But from the vampire she heard only screaming.
Marty had started the job with his slingshot, and Francesco had finished destroying the thing’s left eye with the brief flash of UV light. They had only ever used the light four times before, Francesco had told her, and never since she’d been turned. Jane and Patrick called it an evil, but to Francesco it was a necessary one. As the oldest among them, he knew only too much how essential it was to be at an advantage in a fight between vampires.
Rain said such a weapon made them too human.
Rose stood, her first reaction to turn and look for Marty. But then she saw Francesco. He was spattered with blood, his eyes wide, and Jack was not behind him. Plan’s changed, Rose thought, and that could only mean…
Screaming from downstairs, smashing glass, and the whole house shook as something crashed against internal walls, crushing and splintering plasterboard and wooden studs. Another scream, and this one was quickly cut off.
Someone shouted in the language the vampire had used yesterday, and Rose knew that voice could only come from another beast.
“Mum!” Marty shouted. “Dad!” He looked to Rose first, but he was her only concern.
“Rose!” Francesco said. “Go and help them! There were two more, but one was already inside.”
“A trap for our trap?”
“I suppose so.” Francesco was already advancing on the fallen vampire. The monster clawed at his charred, ruined eyes, black fluid running from the sockets as the initial touch of UV light continued to burn its way deeper. It might reach the brain, Rose knew, or maybe he’d managed to close his eyes a fraction when he saw what was about to happen. Either way, she knew that Francesco could not now leave him alive.
Marty darted for the door, but Rose beat him to it.
“Help them!” he pleaded. There was more violence from downstairs, and Rose could tell from the sounds that reached them that this was between vampires. Whether or not her old parents had been caught, they were too late to influence the outcome now.
“If you want to stay alive, you do as I say,” Rose said. “I need you to—”
It was a stupid trick. They’d pulled it on each other a hundred times before she was turned, sometimes just for fun, other times to steal each other’s food or sweets. Marty looked over her shoulder, eyes growing wide, and shouted, “Look out!” and even as Rose ducked and turned she knew what he’d done. She reached without looking and her fingers snagged on the back of Marty’s shirt, but the fabric ripped and he was gone.
“The boy’s not our concern!” Francesco said, kneeling on the fallen vampire’s neck.
“Fuck you, Francesco,” Rose said. She left the bedroom and went after Marty. If she was very fast, and her brother was very lucky, he might still live.
From the landing beyond the bedroom door she could already see the extent of the chaos. It was a balcony landing with a view into the hallway—she remembered her parents saying it was what had attracted them to the house over three decades before—and down there she could see two struggling figures. One was Patrick, the other a short, thin woman whose face was split by a sharklike mouth, and they were slashing and snarling and biting at each other like fighting dogs. Even though Patrick had the advantage of height and reach, the woman seemed to be faster and more familiar with such violence. Patrick’s growls were anger and effort, while the woman’s snarl was pure ferocity.
There was blood splashed up the walls. The remains of something living was being kicked around the hallway and stepped on, flesh slick on the tiled floor. A knot of bloodied gray hair attached to a chunk of dripping skin swung gently from the hall lamp shade. Rose’s father had been bald even before she was taken, and her mother had refused to dye her grayness.
At the bottom of the staircase, Marty sat huddled against the wall. The bravado he’d shown in his bedroom minutes before was gone. Rose felt a pang of pride in her little, living brother, a terrified kid who’d used a slingshot against a fucking vampire and then still found the courage to come close enough to splash it with battery acid. Faced with danger, he’d reacted with real balls, but faced with the ruin of his mother—the blood and meat; the shattered bones scratching across floor tiles as Patrick and the woman kicked them; the spattered hair and chunks of glistening things that belonged inside a body, not outside—he had crumpled.
Rose looked at the mess of meat and tried to feel something, but the only sensation was hunger.
She growled in anger at herself and descended the staircase in one leap.
Marty looked up and screamed. She grabbed him, no more niceties now, and tried to assess the situation.
Patrick had the woman vampire against the splintered front door, and he was trying to force her through. She fought back but he stood his ground, taking the terrible wounds and pummeling her harder and harder against the vicious splinters. It was a hardwood door, Rose remembered that much. She hoped it would hurt the bitch when he finally impaled her there.
Across the room, the living room door was off its hinges. Furniture in there lay scattered and broken, but Rose sensed that whatever drama the room had witnessed was now over. She should get in there and then out through the window, flee this chaos and get Marty hidden away. She would take whatever Francesco would do to her for leaving them to fight alone, but for her this had always been about Marty. Always.
She darted across the hallway, carrying Marty under her left arm like a bag of meat. She heard his groan as she splashed through the remains of their mother, and her tongue throbbed with bloodlust.
In the living room, she found Rain’s body propped against the wall beside the fireplace. The Humain’s head been torn off and crushed on the marble hearth, the stark shell of her broken skull surprisingly bright in the artificial light. For the first time she understood the look of shock on Francesco’s face when she’d first seen him upstairs.
From the hallway she heard the vampire’s scream as Patrick forced her down onto the sharp shards of the broken door. From beneath Rose’s left arm, her brother whimpered.
“Rose!” Jane appeared at the shattered sitting room window. She had been running, and there was a vicious gash across the bridge of her nose, the wound having just missed both eyes.
“What’s happening? Where’s the third?”
“We lost him. He was…” She looked at Rain’s remains. “Fucker. He was waiting under the stairs.”
“Dad?” Marty whimpered.
“He took the old man,” Jane said, glancing at Marty and raising a disapproving eyebrow at Rose. Dinner for later? her look said.
Patrick entered the room behind her. His face was a mess, teeth and lips dripping with blood, and Rose took a step back toward Jane and the shattered window.
“It’s my own,” he said. “That one’s dead. Francesco’s coming down; we need to go.”
In the distance Rose heard police sirens. Some of the neighbors must have called for help. It was one of their golden rules to avoid contact with police at all costs, whether it be a random check when they wandered at night or something more serious.
“Dad…” Marty whispered. He started struggling and she held on harder, not wanting him to go back out into that hallway. She could smell the rich stench of spilled blood and insides, and when she glanced down at Marty, for a second it was the suit glaring back in terror.
After several thumps from the hall, Francesco appeared in the doorway. “Come on,” he said. “Where are the others?”