I saw two or three human figures in the bushes below my balcony—the shrubs made an accurate count difficult from a distance—and one near the street door. Big red-and-black auras marked them as vampires or high-level demi-vamps. I would have bet there were a couple more in the driveway or inside the garage. Crap. I paused in a shadow and dialed my home phone.
“That you?” Quinton asked, not wanting to use my name, I guessed.
“Yeah. I see three or four down here, guessing two more in the garage. How many upstairs?”
“Two that I can make out. There could be someone farther down the hall, but I don’t know.”
“Pretty heavy crowd. Did they say anything to you when you told them I wasn’t home?”
“No. They just keep pounding on the door.” I could hear it through the phone, steady as a dance beat.
The figure near my front door turned, looking for me, I thought. My breath caught in my chest as the figure rotated toward me: Its eyes, even at a distance, gleamed with an orange hellfire light. Asete. I peered into the darkness, hoping to see if any of the others had the telltale ember eyes. Given the weirdness of the situation, I couldn’t be sure it was just one sort of monster prowling my place. It was difficult to be sure, but I didn’t think all of them were asetem.
“Either of your knockers have kind of glowing eyes?” I asked, trying to fade back into heat blur from the truck’s engine. I wasn’t sure they could pick out my body heat, especially with the asphalt road still radiant from the long spring day, but I didn’t want to take that risk.
“Yeah.”
Two asetem at least. Wygan’s people. I didn’t want another fight. We just had to get out, somehow. Minimal physical contact, break through, and run. . . .
“And here’s the bad news,” Quinton added. “The stunners don’t take that kind out. I upped the voltage, so they might go down, but they don’t stay there.”
I breathed out. “Shit.”
“On the other hand, they seem a little slower than the regular kind.”
“How—?” I started.
“Later. I left a couple of the new stunners in your glove compartment. Just in case.”
“All right. We’ll make a simultaneous push. But I have to make another call. When you hear my neighbor shouting, rush the door. Oh—put the ferret away first.”
He chuckled. “Got her.”
“Fine.” I hung up and called Rick, my next-door neighbor.
“Hey, Rick. It’s Harper.” I could hear Grendel, his pit bull, barking.
“Hey, yeah, what the hell—”
“Rough customers. Do me a favor: Call the cops.” I figured I’d rather have to explain away the mess to Solis—if he showed up—than battle half a dozen vampires.
“I already did. Should be here any minute.”
“Great. Would you take Grendel, go stand in your doorway, and tell those jerks in the hall that? You may have to shout ....”
“Damn right I will.” He muttered a few imprecations against our visitors’ parentage and physiology before he hung up.
I scrambled back into the Land Rover and grabbed both the stun sticks from the glove box. I left my purse in the car and took only the keys, shoving them into my pants pocket so I had both hands free for the stunners. I started running toward the condo’s shrubbery and was launching myself at the first figure in the bushes when I heard Grendel go crazy inside the building.
The psychic stink of the vampire made me gag as it turned to grapple with me. I couldn’t see the eyes to know if this was an asete or just the usual bloodsucking fiend as I felt sharp fingernails cut into my upper arms, but I had plenty of movement left to punch the prongs of the device against its body and hold down the discharge button. The vampire convulsed and tossed me aside as it collapsed onto the ground, twitching into unconsciousness. OK, one plain vampire . . . though it had more the white-snake appearance of the asetem. . . .
The second one pounced and I wrenched around in his grip, barely fast enough to discharge the second stun stick into him. He jerked back, and then I was facing a fireball that scorched my face as he immolated. Ash ringed the place where he’d fallen, but of a body, there was no other trace. Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. . . . Upped the voltage, did he? So . . . what, one vampire returned to grave dust? Which made the previous one an asete that would be getting up again any second.
I heard a distant gunshot and a scream, the blip of a siren as a patrol car rounded the corner. The asete near the door took two long steps toward me, hesitated, then whipped around and joined a second fire-eyed creature as it bounded out of the building into the night. They escaped as the patrolmen came running from their car with guns drawn, rushing for the door. I heard one chattering into his shoulder-mounted radio that shots had been fired and they were investigating.
The second one paused beside me. “You OK?”
“Yeah. I live here. Was going in when those guys came out. First one knocked me down.”
“Stay put.”
I nodded and let them get well ahead of me before I followed them inside.
Someone was making a strange keening sound upstairs. It was an ugly noise that put a blade of ice down my spine. It was hard not to run up the steps, looking for Quinton and whatever was making that horrible sound. But I stumbled upward, keeping back so I wouldn’t bang into the policemen. The post-fight burnout was making me clumsy and muzzy-headed.
I got to the landing as the cops got to my door—which was standing open, a drift of dirty white ash spread across the carpet in front of it. Quinton was kneeling down in the hallway, holding on to Rick who sat propped against the cream-colored wall beneath a red smear. Grendel was howling in despair. The rest of my neighbors were easing back into their own homes, pulling the doors not quite shut as they spotted the patrolmen.
“. . . ambulance, damn it,” Quinton shouted back at the policemen.
The one cop reholstered his gun and got down beside Rick and Quinton, calling for a medic on his radio. The other took a fast survey of the hallway and open doors, making sure the place was safe before he also holstered his piece. That was the one who spotted me and came back to run me off.
I refused to leave. “That’s my neighbor. And the other one’s my boyfriend. I live in the unit with the open door.”
“Looks like someone—maybe your boyfriend—has gone and shot your neighbor.”
“Ask him.” I wanted to cry from tiredness and anger, but I didn’t give in, even though it might have bought some sympathy from the cop.
The cop left me with a warning to stay where I was this time and went over to his partner. They conferred and then the suspicious one spoke to Quinton. I saw him shake his head.
Another siren wailed and curdled to silence outside. The Medic One crew rattled up the stairs a few moments later with trauma bags and shoved everyone else aside to get to Rick. Grendel snapped and growled, not wanting to let them near his master. Rick muttered something and Quinton called the dog to him. Quinton and the dog made their way to me and we slumped down against the wall beside my gaping door.
I tried to form a question, but all that made it out was “What—?”
Quinton shook his head. “Those guys shot him when Grendel tried to jump them. I think they meant to kill the dog, but they were lousy shots. One got Rick in the arm, one in the leg. He’ll be all right, I think.”
So we weren’t going to talk about vampires with guns while the police were there. I nodded. I didn’t have enough energy left to try to make sense of any of it. We sat and looked stunned, gave our names to the cops—or rather Quinton gave our names of record when asked—and staggered into my condo once Rick was removed to the hospital and the rest of the scene was settled for the night.