She came closer, all pale skin and mangled flesh, and my body suddenly went insane with lust. Stupid body. It had a lot more clout at the moment than it usually did, with my mind still reeling from the blast.

I aimed a punch at Madeline’s face. She caught my hand as the weak blow came in, and kissed the inside of my wrist. Sweet silver lightning exploded up my arm and down my spine. Whatever was left of my brain went away, and the next thing I knew she was pressing her chest against mine, her mouth against mine, slowly, sensuously overbearing me.

And then a burned corpse came out of the woods.

That was all I could think of to describe it. Half the body was blacker than a hamburger that had fallen through the bars of a charcoal grill. The rest was red and purple and swollen with bruises and bloody blisters, with very, very occasional strips of pale white skin. A few wisps of dark hair were attached to her skull. I say her because technically the corpse was female, though that hardly mattered amongst all the burned and pulverized meat that smelled slightly of tequila.

The only things I really recognized were the cold silver eyes.

Lara Raith’s eyes were bright with an insane rage and a terrible hunger as she snaked her bruised, swollen left arm around Madeline’s wind-pipe, and tightened it with a horrible strength.

Madeline cried out as her head was jerked back sharply—and then she made no sound at all as the wind was trapped inside her lungs. The burned, blackened corpse that was Lara Raith dug one fire-ruined hip into Madeline’s upper back, using Madeline’s own spine as a fulcrum against her.

Lara spoke, and her voice was something straight from Hell. It was lower, smokier, but every bit as lovely as it ever was. “Madeline,” she purred, “I’ve wanted to do this with you since we were little girls.”

Lara’s burned black right hand, withered, it seemed, down to bones and sinew, reached slowly, sensually around Madeline’s straining abdomen. Slowly, very slowly, Lara sunk her fingertips into flesh, just beneath the floating rib on Madeline’s left flank. Madeline’s face contorted and she tried to scream.

Lara shuddered. Her shoulders twisted. And she ripped an open furrow as wide as her four fingers across Madeline’s stomach, pale flesh parting, as wet red and greythings slithered out.

Lara’s tongue emerged from her mouth, bright pink, and touched Madeline’s earlobe. “Listen to me,” she hissed. Her burned hand continued pulling things out of Madeline’s body, a hideous intimacy. “Listen to me.”

Power shuddered in those words. I felt an insane desire to rush toward Lara’s ruined flesh and give her my ears, ripped off with my own fingers, if necessary.

Madeline shuddered, the strength gone out of her body. Her mouth continued trying to move, but her eyes went unfocused at the power in Lara’s voice. “For once in your life,” Lara continued, kissing Madeline’s throat with her burned, broken lips, “you are going to be useful.”

Madeline’s eyes rolled back in her head, and her body sagged helplessly back against Lara.

My brain got back onto the clock. I pushed myself away from Lara and Madeline’s nauseating, horribly compelling embrace. Binder was sitting with his hands over his ears, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I grabbed him under the arms and hauled him away from the entwined Raiths, maybe fifty yards downhill, through some thick brush and around the bole of a large old hickory tree. Binder was obviously in pain as I pulled him—and he was pushing with his unwounded leg, doing his best to assist me.

“Bloody hell,” he panted, as I set him down. “Bloody hell and brimstone.”

I staggered and sat down across from him, panting to get my breath back and to push the sight of Lara devouring Madeline out of my head. “No kidding.”

“Some of the bloody fools I’ve known,” Binder said. “Can’t stop talking about how tragic they are. The poor lonely vampires. How they’re just like us. Bloody idiots.”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice raw.

We sat there for a few seconds. From up the slope, there was a low, soft, and eager cry.

We shuddered and tried to look as if we hadn’t heard anything.

Binder stared at me for a moment, and then said, “Why?”

“Once Lara got going, she might not be able to stop. She’d have eaten you, too.”

“Too right,” Binder agreed fervently. “But that ain’t the question. Why?”

“Somebody has to be human.”

Binder looked at me as if I was speaking in a language he’d never been very good at, and hadn’t heard in years. Then he looked sharply down and away. He nodded, without looking up, and said, “Cheers, mate.”

“Fuck you,” I told him tiredly. “How bad are you hit?”

“Broke the bone, I think,” he said. “Didn’t come out. Didn’t hit anything too bad or I’d be gone by now.”

He’d already tied a strip of cloth tightly around the wound. His wet suit was probably aiding it in acting as a pressure bandage.

“Who was Madeline working for?” I asked.

He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me.”

“Think,” I said. “Think hard.”

“All I know,” he said, “is that it was some bloke with a lot of money. I never talked to him. When she was on the phone with him, they spoke English. He wasn’t a native speaker. Sounded like he’d learned it from a Continental.”

I frowned. Television has most people confident that they could identify the nationality of anyone speaking English, but in the real world, accents could be muddy as hell, especially when you learned from a non-native speaker. Try to imagine the results, for example, of a Polish man learning English from a German teaching at a Belgian university. The resulting accent would twist a linguist’s brain into knots.

I eyed Binder. “Can you get out of here on your own?”

He shivered. “This place? I bloody well can.”

I nodded. Binder was responsible for the death of a Warden, but it wasn’t as though it had been personal. I could bill that charge to Madeline Raith’s corpse. “Do business in my town or against the Council again and I’ll kill you. Clear?”

“Crystal, mate. Crystal.”

I got up and started to go. I didn’t have my staff, my blasting rod, or my gun. They were back up the hillside.

I’d come back for them later.

“Wait,” Binder said. He grunted and took off his belt, and I nearly kicked him in the head, thinking he was going for a weapon. Instead, he just offered the belt to me. It had a fairly normal-looking black fanny pack on it.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“Two more concussion grenades,” he said.

I put two and two together. My brain was back on the job. “You’d rather not be holding the matches to the one that got Lara, eh?”

“Too right,” he said. I started to turn away and he touched my leg. He leaned toward me a bit and said, very quietly, “Waterproof pocket inside has a phone in it. Boss lady had me hold it for her. It’s powered off. Maybe the lady cop would find it interesting.”

I stared hard at him for a second, and an understanding passed between us. “If this pans out,” I said, “maybe I’ll forget to mention to the Wardens that you survived.”

He nodded and sank back onto the ground. “Never want to see you again, mate. Too right I don’t.”

I snapped the belt closed and hung it across one shoulder, where I could get to the larger pouch in a hurry if I needed to. Then I got on to the next point of business—finding Will and Georgia.

They were both lying on the ground maybe sixty yards from where I’d last seen them. It looked like they’d been circling around the site of the battle with Madeline, planning on coming back in from the far side. I moved easily and soundlessly through the woods and found them on the ground, back in human form.

“Will,” I hissed quietly.

He lifted his head and looked around vaguely. “Uh. What?”