The second seemed to be taller and more muscular than the other two. She wore what looked like a man’s shirt, closed with only a single button. Her long hair was a mess, still tousled from sleep, and she held an exotic-looking axe in her hands, its blade honed along a concave edge instead of the more conventional convex one.

Without any visible signal, they all started prowling forward at the same time—and it was a prowl, an atavistic, feline motion that carried what were very clearly predators forward in total silence. Lara paused when she reached me, glanced over my injuries with cold silver eyes and whispered, “Stay down.”

No problem, I thought dully. Down is easy.

The screaming stopped with a last stuttering burst of gunfire. The security guy came staggering around the corner. Blood matted his hair and covered half of his face. There was a long tear through his jacket on the left side. His left arm hung uselessly, but he still gripped the handle of his miniature assault weapon with his right. He wavered and dropped to one knee as he spotted the three vampires.

Lara gestured with a hand, and the other two spread out and moved forward, while she came to the side of the wounded guard. “What happened?”

“We hit it,” he said, his voice slurred. “We hit it with everything. Didn’t even slow it down. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”

“You’re bleeding,” Lara said in a calm tone. “Get behind me. Defend the wizard.”

He nodded unsteadily. “Yeah. Okay.”

Lara’s guy had to be either incredibly lucky or really good to have survived a close-quarters battle with the skinwalker. I stared dully at security guy for a second before my impact-addled brain sent up a warning flag. Nobody was that lucky.

“Lara!” I choked out.

Security guy turned in a blur of motion, sweeping the machine gun at Lara’s head like a club—but she had begun moving the instant she’d heard my warning and he missed knocking her head off her shoulders by a fraction of an inch. She flung herself to one side and rolled as security guy’s other arm flashed out, lengthening and sprouting yellow fur and claws as it came. She avoided the worst of it, but the skinwalker’s claws left a triple line of incisions down one shapely thigh, and they welled with blood a little too pale and pearly to be human.

The skinwalker followed her motion, surging forward, its body broadening and thickening into the form of something like a great bear with oversized jaws and vicious fangs. It overbore her by sheer mass, slapping and raking with its clawed paws, snapping with its steely jaws. I heard a bone break, heard Lara cry out in rage—and then the skinwalker flew straight up into the ceiling, its head and shoulders slamming into it with such force that it went cleanly through it, and out onto the floor above.

Lara had rolled to her back, and had launched the thing away from her with her legs. They were long and smoothly muscled and utterly desirable, even as she lowered them and rolled lightly to her feet, holding one arm tucked in close to her side. Her skin shone with cold, alien power, and her eyes had become spheres of pure white. She stared at the ceiling for a few seconds, slowly lifting and straightening her arm as she did.

Her forearm had received a compound fracture. I could see bone poking out through the flesh. But over the next few seconds, the flesh seemed to ripple and become more malleable. The bone withdrew, vanishing beneath the skin of her arm—even the hole that the bone had torn in the skin sealed slowly closed, and in ten seconds I couldn’t even tell she’d been hurt.

She turned those empty white eyes to me and stared at me with an expression of focused naked hunger. For a second, I felt my body responding to her desire, even as woozy as I was, but that was quickly snuffed out by a surge of nausea. I turned my head and threw up onto the expensive floor while my head and neck screamed with pain.

When I looked up again, Lara had turned her head away from me. She picked up her fallen weapon—but the machine pistol had been bent into the shape of a comma by a blow from the skinwalker’s sledgehammer paws. She discarded it, recovered her sword, and drew the matching weapon from her belt. She was breathing quickly—not in effort, but in raw excitement, and the tips of her breasts strained against her dirtied blouse. She licked her lips slowly and said, evidently for my benefit, “I sometimes see Madeline’s point.”

There was a feminine scream from somewhere close by, a challenge that was answered by a leonine roar that shook the hallway. The short-haired sister flew into the wall at the T intersection ahead, and collapsed like a rag doll. There were sounds of swift motion from around the corner, and a gasp.

Then silence.

A moment later, a blur came around the corner, dragging the axe-wielding sister’s limp form by the hair. The veil faded as the skinwalker came closer, once more showing us its bestial, not-quite-human form. It stopped in front of us, maybe ten feet away. Then, quite casually, it lifted one of the unconscious vampire’s hands to its fanged mouth and, never looking away from Lara, calmly nipped off a finger and swallowed it.

Lara narrowed her eyes, and her rich mouth split into a wide, hungry smile. “Did you need a break before we continue?”

The skinwalker spoke, its voice weirdly modulated, as if several different creatures were approximating speech at the same time. “Break?”

With the word, it calmly snapped the vampire girl’s left arm in midhumerus.

Hell’s bells.

“I am going to kill you,” Lara said calmly.

The skinwalker laughed. It was a hideous sound. “Little phage. Even here at the center of your power, you could not stop me. Your warriors lay slain. Your fellow phages are fallen. Even the foolish pretenders to power visiting your house could not stop me.”

I’d gotten enough of my head back together to push myself to my feet. Lara never looked at me, but I could sense her attention on me nonetheless. I didn’t have time to gather my will for a magical strike. The skinwalker would feel me doing it long before it became a fact.

Fortunately, I plan for such contingencies.

The eight silver rings I wore, one on each of my fingers, served a couple of purposes. The triple bands of silver were moderately heavy, and if I had to slug someone, they made a passably good imitation of brass knuckles. But their main purpose was to store back a little kinetic energy every time I moved one of my arms. It took a while to build up a charge, but when they were ready to go, I could release the force stored in each ring with instant precision. A blast from a single band of a ring could knock a big man off his feet and take the fight out of him in the process. There were three bands to each ring—which meant that I had a dozen times that much force ready to go on each hand.

I didn’t bother to say anything to Lara. I just lifted my right fist and triggered every ring on it, unleashing a pile driver of kinetic energy at the skinwalker. Lara bounded forward at the same instant, swords spinning, ready to lay into the skinwalker when my strike threw it off balance and distracted it.

But the skinwalker lifted its left hand, fingers crooked into a familiar defensive gesture, and the wave of force that should have knocked it tail over teakettle bounced back from it like light from a mirror—and struck Lara full-on instead.

Lara let out a startled whuffas the equivalent force of a speeding car slammed into her, knocked her back, and flattened her against the mound of rubble still filling the hallway behind me.

The skinwalker’s mouth split into a leering smile of its own, and its bestial voice purred, “Break, little phage. Break.”

Lara gasped and lifted herself up with her arms. Her white eyes were fixed on the skinwalker, her lips twisted into a defiant snarl.